Do You Really Want the Truth About 9/11 and Election Fraud - - See OIL EMPIRE for much more information

Bush Plans Long Escalating Wars

As Robert Parry points out, Bush plans long wars, is purging any doubters like Colin Powell and installing sycophants who will support his every wish. So rather than have a more moderate second term, Bush plans on more wars. I think he will decide to use nuclear weapons and believe that nuclear weapons use has been built into the neocon middle-east plan. Otherwise why would he lower the nuclear barrier in his new preemptive war doctrines, make new nuclear weapons and plan to resume testing?

George W. Bush’s vision for America’s future is coming into clearer focus following Election 2004: For the next generation or more, it appears the American people will be asked to sacrifice their children, their tax dollars and possibly the remnants of their democracy to what a top U.S. commander now candidly calls the “Long War.”

Will Bush Empire Go Nuclear in 2005

The US will not accept defeat in Iraq, and is likely to militarily over extend itself there, and with their other neocon-planned conquests in the Middle East. That will place them in what I believe is a pre-planned position: of either accepting defeat, or using nuclear weapons "to avoid defeat of freedom and democracy". The mass media in the US has demonstrated that it can be relied on to back Bush - and deliver a propagandised US public, that will mainly support nuclear weapons use to avoid defeat in "the war on terrorism".

The Empire in the Year 2005

The Iraqi resistance has proven that the US Empire is not invincible. With over 1500 combat deaths, close to 25,000 disabled soldiers and over 35,000 suffering severe "mental illnesses", the US occupation army is incapable of bringing the colonial war to a victorious conclusion.
...The logic of Washington for 2005 is that the War must continue, victory must be secured – no matter what the cost in human lives, Iraqi or US. The treasury and the budget is hostage to the Logic of War: to defend the image of imperial invincibility, the empire will be brought to its knees.

New Israeli/US Offensives in Mid-East

Uri Avnery is one of the leading Israeli writers opposing Sharon's murderous actions, exposing his lies and real plans. The following is an excellent example of Avnery's work.
See: http://www.globalresearch.ca for more excellent articles by top journalists and writers.

When the fruit sellers at the Tel Aviv market shout "the boss has gone crazy!" they mean that they are selling their merchandise at ridiculously low prices.
In the world’s capitals, a similar cry is now being heard: "The boss has gone crazy!" – but it is not about the price of tomatoes.
It refers to the new situation, after the reelection of George W. Bush for four more years.

Fallujah Bombed by US to Rubble

Under the slogan of "bringing liberation, Democracy and freedom to grateful Iraqis" the US is laying waste to the country. 60-70% of Fallujah destroyed by bombing is an example of how the US is making war on the people while purporting to be making war on terrorism. They are likely to use the same "bombing to rubble" tactic on other Iraq cities.

Scenes of widespread destruction have greeted residents allowed back into the Iraqi city of Falluja following the US assault in November. BBC News spoke to Dr Saleh Hussein Isawi, the acting director of the Falluja general hospital, who accompanied some of the refugees to the city.

One of the blessings of having been around a long time is that in any dark moment of our national life you can usually think of another moment that, if you put your mind to it, seemed almost as dark or maybe darker: McCarthyism, Watergate, the disaster of Vietnam.
But never in the memory of the living generation have the errors, falsifications and unreason of policy come in such rapid and overwhelming succession that each buries its predecessor before it's even partially absorbed, much less understood.

It is time to invade Cuba and put an end to what has become another Devil's Island in the annals of government-sanctioned torture. The barbaric treatment of political prisoners on the island is made no more palatable by being conducted in the name of an ideology that claims to be liberating the world from its shackles.
...."Now there is no question that these guys have been tortured," said Brent Mickum, a Washington attorney for one of the roughly 10 percent of detainees at the camp who have finally secured legal representation. "Every allegation that I've heard has now come to pass and been confirmed by the government's own papers."
Even more troubling is that the FBI agents make it clear this is not the work of a few poorly supervised sadists. Their reports refer to what they described as a new--and very much secret--executive order on prisoner treatment by the President at the top of the camp's chain of command, which allowed for severe interrogation tactics, including "sleep deprivation and stress positions" combined with "loud music, interrogators yelling at subjects and prisoners with hoods on their heads."

George W. Bush, their commander-in-chief, calls them "the troops." He says they're on a "noble 'n vital" mission in Iraq. When asked about them, Bush says his "thoughts 'n prayers" go out to them. When shrapnel shreds their limbs or they are blown to bits by bombs, he says he "grieves 'n mourns" for them. Because of the troops, Bush says "America and the world are a safer place (sic)."

Professor Boyle is a very informed and perceptive analyst of International Affairs who was educated as a neo-conservative and knows how they think. He shows why, with their twisted ideology, “today’s Neocons are committing war crimes abroad while building a police state at home.” It gives in-depth information which helps predict what, and how far, the Neocon Administration will go.
The following analysis is a result of my extensive research, much of which is on this web site under various headings. I’ve tried to be objective and base my analysis of Bush and his administration and its direction, on fact.

War Is Peace:

The Pax Americana Imperium Wishes You An Orwellian Christmas!
Americans have run the entire cycle of Christmas-deconstruction by spiritualizing, sentimentalizing, universalizing, and -- ultimately -- commercializing the holiday. Today, our version of Christmas bears almost no relationship to the nativity story in the synoptic Gospels.

The most recent among many testing glitches of the Bush administration missile defense program should remind us that this exorbitant and heavily politicized effort should be scrapped. Until September 11, in the eyes of conservatives, the litmus test for patriotism was support for missile defense. Now they have moved on to view backing for the troubled Iraq War as the badge of armchair courage. Yet the 9/11 attacks demonstrated that the missile defense program did not address the most severe threats facing the United States.
The most serious threats to the U.S. homeland won’t arrive by missile. They’ll likely be attacks using either conventional means—as on 9/11—or nuclear, biological or chemical weapons smuggled into the country by ship or delivered by small aircraft. Terrorists are unlikely to have the technology to develop the long-range missiles that a missile defense system is designed to intercept using other missiles or lasers.

THE EMPIRE HAS NO CLOTHES   U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed

  Most Americans don’t think of their government as an empire, but in fact the United States has been steadily expanding its control of overseas territories since the turn of the twentieth century. Now, through political intimidation and over 700 military bases worldwide, the U.S. holds sway over an area that dwarfs the great empires of world history.
In The Empire Has No Clothes, Ivan Eland, a leading expert on U.S. defense policy and national security, examines American military interventions around the world from the Spanish-American War to the invasion of Iraq.

...Baha Mousa had been brutally beaten while hooded and tied up--none of the other prisoners suffering with him were ever charged with any crime--by soldiers who gave them the names of footballers. His father was a police colonel and had seen his son before his arrest at a local hotel. He even acquired a note from the arresting officer that Baha would be looked after. His name--typically--was meaningless: it was signed "Second Lieutenant Mike".

...In his 1974 book, "The Permanent War Economy," he composed a long list of military trade-offs. The money spent on one Huey helicopter, he said, could buy 66 low-priced homes, while a recent $69 million reduction in child-nutrition programs represented the cost of two DE-1052 destroyer escorts. He added, "To eliminate hunger in America = $4-5 billion = C-5A aircraft program."
Ralph Nader on Seymour Melman:-
Before he passed away this month, Seymour Melman had completed a concise book manuscript titled, "Wars, Ltd.: The Rise and Fall of America's Permanent War Economy". He was having trouble finding a good publisher, when I spoke with him earlier this summer.
But he will leave a legacy of wisdom, insight, humanity, consistency, and diligence. In a society whose rulers and corporatists seal the people off from such magnificent minds and inundate them with trivia, distraction and the hot air artists daily bellowing their lucrative ignorance, sagacious Americans like Seymour Melman will not receive the attention the citizenry deserves unless we the people, who own the public airwaves, begin to control and use our own media rights
For more information, visit www.citizenworks.org

WHY DON'T we Americans look directly at the war? We avert our gaze, knowing that the situation in Iraq grows more desperate by the day. Vaunted "coalition" efforts to "break the back" of the "insurgency" have only strengthened it. The violence among Iraqis would surely qualify as civil war -- except that only one side is fighting. The structures of relief and repair are gone. Whole cities are destroyed, populations displaced. The hope of Iraqi elections is mortally compromised. "Coalition" members are dropping out. The mission of American force is to secure the country, but it can't secure itself. The performance of US intelligence has been consistent: Its strategic failures caused the war, and its tactical ignorance of the enemy is losing the war. ICH    Review of the book "Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War."

The US selected Iyad Allawi, who served the interests of the USA for many years as a clandestine CIA agent staging explosions in Iraq, as their interim Prime Minister of Iraq.
The US empowered Allawi, who assassinated suspected "terrorists" in police custody, to rule Iraq and "authorise" the US destruction of Fallujah. Thus he is directly involved in the killing of thousands of his fellow countrymen, both ordinary men, women and children, and anyone thought to be resisting the US invader. Basically Allawi is the US mouthpiece, trying to give legitimacy to war crimes and the criminal US invasion, occupation and continuing murder of opponents. This man can in no way represent the Iraqi people.

Iyad Allawi, now the designated prime minister of Iraq, ran an exile organization intent on deposing Saddam Hussein that sent agents into Baghdad in the early 1990's to plant bombs and sabotage government facilities under the direction of the C.I.A., several former intelligence officials say.
Dr. Allawi's group, the Iraqi National Accord, used car bombs and other explosive devices... Ex-CIA officer Robert Baer, recalled that a bombing during that period "blew up a school bus; schoolchildren were killed."

These are very revealing quotes about the real reasons for the US war, and how the neocon administration
settled on the non-existant WMD to use as one of their justifications. After stealing the 2004 election, Bush claims a mandate to continue with more of the same. Is Iran next?

There Has Been A Fascist Coup in This Country With Media Complicity

Noam Chomsky has lucidly explicated the imperial consensus adhered to by both parties since the US became No I after WW11. However he has also pointed out that the Bush National Security Strategy scared even the mainstream foreign policy elite. It bodes an escalation of the international arms race and all kinds of unprecedented threats to our survival.
I see major differences between what the Kerry Administration would have done and what the Bush agenda is. However considering the fecklessness of Kerry and the Democrats they of course are morally complicit in a fascist coup.
I say a fascist coup-one must realize that the neo-cons wielding the power in the Bush Administration had been out of power since Reagan. One must also remember that all indications are that neither the military nor the CIA wanted the war in Iraq. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had testified before Congress in the summer of 2002 that war on Iraq would be a bad idea. So did Scowcroft, Eagleburger, etc. The CIA reported at that time--front page of NY Times--that Saddam was contained. The Bush Junta prevailed because of its fanaticism and determination--just as Hitler did. (Clinton endorsed "regime change"--he was far too cautious to go ahead with this crazy war.)

Bush's various extreme actions and desire for more wars in the Middle East may be one reason why Bush is using such extraordinary cruel tactics. He is waging a war mainly on Iraqi civilians that will make people hate and resist the US . Then Bush again fools the US people by telling them that this proves the people are really terrorists and the US duty is to make war on them - any kind of foul war he chooses and forget international law.

November 9th, 2004 was Fallujah's 9/11 Tuesday. It marked the peak of three days of indiscriminate bombing of Fallujah by US forces.
Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem Al-Shaalan promised that the day would be decisive. It wasn't. It was inhumane beyond belief, almost beyond comprehension.
The bomb blitz featured weapons of mass destruction: banned napalm-type munitions, chemical poison gas and super-bombs of up to 2,000-pounds. The ground assault was indiscriminate. The target was a city where at least 60,000 civilians outnumbered rebel fighters by over thirty to one.
The US Prevented Aid Entering the City for Weeks

An exclusive, in-depth interview with journalist Dahr Jamail on what is really going on in Iraq
Newtopia: The US Corporate media consistently characterizes the Iraqi resistance as "foreign terrorists and former Ba’athist insurgents". Is this accurate?
Dahr Jamail: This is propaganda of the worst kind. Most Iraqis refer to the Iraqi Resistance as "patriots." They are people who have had family members killed, detained, tortured and humiliated by the illegal occupiers of their shattered country. Calling them "foreign terrorists" and "Ba’athist insurgents" is simply a lie.

An international legal team has filed a criminal complaint against US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top US officials over the Abu Ghraib prisoner torture and abuse scandal in Iraq.
The New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and Berlin's Republican Lawyers' Association have filed the complaint in Germany.

Known as the "city of mosques" for its more than 200 mosques, Fallujah is also known for refusing to add Saddam’s name to the call for prayers from its ancient minarets. It is located on the banks of river Euphrates, the largest river in Southwest Asia. The 1700 miles long Euphrates is linked with some of the most important events in olden history.
The city of Ur, found at its mouth, was the birthplace of Abraham. On its banks stood the city of Babylon. In the past, the army of Necho was defeated on its banks by Nebuchadnezzar. Cyrus the Younger and Crassus perished after crossing it. Alexander traversed it and continued his journey eastward. Presently, George Bush’s forces are crossing and re-crossing it making its waters redder each time with the blood of Fallujah’s citizens.

This chink in the neocon armour, is of fundamental importance and well worth a read. The neocons have been singularly successful in foisting a litany of lies about Iraq WMD, links to al-Qaeda, links to 9/11 attacks, links to terrorism and future attacks. They continue their buoyant attitudes as their killing, bombing and general mass destruction increases. Now they are claiming that the American people have given them, and their spokesman Bush, a mandate to continue, and impose the rest of their agenda on the world.

The Iraq war opened a fratricidal split among United States neo–conservatives. Danny Postel examines the bitter dispute between two leading neocons, Francis Fukuyama and Charles Krauthammer, and suggests that Fukuyama’s critique of the Iraq war and decision not to vote for George W Bush is a significant political as well as intellectual moment.

There is intense speculation in the corridors of Washington over where foreign policy might head in the next four years.
But while Iraq and Iran may top the list, you hear almost no talk - at least at the moment - about Washington's "war on terror" against al-Qaeda.

"Doctors in Fallujah are reporting there are patients in the hospital there who were forced out by the Americans," says Mehdi Abdulla, a 33-year-old ambulance driver at a hospital in Baghdad. "Some doctors there told me they had a major operation going, but the soldiers took the doctors away and left the patient to die." He looks at the ground, then away to the distance.
More articles from antiwar.com

This superlatively excellent Canadian lawyers call for a ban on Bush visits, and Bush's indictment for war crimes, deserves to be put on the agenda of every peace group everywhere.
They could do a peace action and send it to all their politicians, perhaps more than once, and lobby them as well.
Repeated emphasis is effective, as Bush continually demonstrates.
It could be applied in every country, widely publicised, and forwarded to others.
Surely this kind of effective action is better than letting Bush continue to create his new “truths” and self-serving pre-emptive nuclear war doctrines. Most people and most mass media remain silent while Bush and his neo-cons build their “1984 perpetual wars” type of world over the next 4 years, maybe longer. The Canadian lawyer's letter can be used to express a peace action which communicates that Bush and accomplices are increasingly perceived as war criminals.

There was a bipartisan consensus on last Sunday's televised political talk-shows that the US Senate will confirm, with relative ease, Mr. Bush's appointment of Alberto R. Gonzales as the next Attorney General ("AG").  However, if our Senators retain any respect for universal human rights and the rule of constitutional and international law, they will vigorously oppose Mr. Gonzales' appointment as our new AG. [1] [2]  Furthermore, it's imperative that our Senators, both left and right, defeat this unwise appointment for the following five reasons. 

.......Shooting a wounded unarmed solider is a clear breach of the Geneva Conventions. Article 3 holds that "persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat (out of combat) by sickness, wounds, detention or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely".

Dear Mr. Martin:
It was with absolute dismay that we learned of the planned visit of President Bush to Canada on November 30th 2004.   Surely you are aware of the many grave crimes against humanity and war crimes for which President Bush stands properly accused by the world, starting with the Nuremberg Tribunal´s ‘supreme international crime´ of waging an aggressive war against Iraq in defiance of international law and the Charter of the United Nations, and including systematic and massive violations of the Geneva Conventions Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War and Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, as well as the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

Dear Mr. Martin:
Canada is at a crossroads – and under heavy pressure from the United States – with respect to the U.S.’s “missile defence” program. This program should be seen clearly – and assertively and publicly acknowledged by Canada – for what it is, nothing less than a pre-emptive action by the United States to dictate how space is to be used and controlled to benefit and advance American interests.
As the Iraq war and its aftermath have borne out, pre-emptive action by one player in the arena of international affairs is not only immoral, it has wholly unpredictable and tragic consequences.              URGENT

We condemn the unjust, immoral and brutal killing of Mrs. Margaret Hassan in Iraq. This woman was an angel of mercy, a shining light to those who needed help for decades in Iraq. She stood up to Saddam Hussein and to the U.S.military, she wanted only to help the people of her adopted country.
We also do not believe any Muslims did this. There is an dictum in the Qur'an which forbids the killing of women; also, the killing of hostages. Also, Muslims and Iraqis had nothing to gain by killing this innocent, God-like, saint of a woman.

"It has never happened in history that a nation that has won a war has been held accountable for atrocities committed in preparing for and waging that war. We intend to make this one different. What took place was the use of technological material to destroy a defenseless country. From 125,000 to 300,000 people were killed... We recognize our role in history is to bring the transgressors to justice." Ramsey Clark

Why are the thousands of disgruntled GIs, their families and Veterans who question Bush's wisdom and veracity in e-mails and letters sent to Michael Moore rarely, if at all, represented in the mainstream media?
That is because the White House pretty much controls what comes through the mainstream media pipeline, particularly on television. Television news portrays the Karl Rove image of Bush surrounded by adoring, supportive troops in carefully choreographed photo-ops. The most notorious of these was the presidential crotch-stuffing appearance of Bush during his "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier stunt.       Buzzflash

The worst nightmare scenario has come true. The neo-conservatives claim they have just had a mandate to continue creating a new American version of reality. Kerry won the US Presidential election, but like Gore in 2000, was cheated out of his victory by the machinations of the neo-conservatives and their Republican allies and others in the voting machine industry.
(see: http://www.nuclearfree.org.nz/archives/ohio.htm )

In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world.Now they promise to protect us from nightmares.
The most frightening of these is the threat of an international terror network.But just as the dreams were not true, neither are these nightmares.

In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares. The most frightening of these is the threat of an international terror network. But just as the dreams were not true, neither are these nightmares. Go to http://207.44.245.159/video1037.htm and look for Transcript

The Power of Nightmares continues its assessment of whether the threat from a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion. Part two, the Phantom Victory looks at how two groups, radical Islamists and neo-conservatives with seemingly opposing ideologies came together to defeat a common enemy. Go to http://207.44.245.159/video1038.htm and look for Transcript

The Power of Nightmares assesses whether the threat from a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion. In the concluding part of the series, the programme explains how the illusion was created and who benefits from it.
Go to http://207.44.245.159/video1040.htm and look for Transcript

Some NZ newspapers, owned by overseas media moguls, are subtly pushing the Bush/Neocon political and war agenda. They write editorials and select articles which favour the US Iraq war and justifications for war. They severely limit, or do not publish letters and articles with facts which expose a biased editorial, or the truth about biased coverage of a situation involving the US. At the same time they like to present themselves as a "free press printing the truth and all the news that's fit to print". That's good business as people don't like to think that they are buying, reading and believing a load of lies.

It is Bush and Blair, not the Iraqi resistance, who fear free elections
George Bush and Tony Blair have apparently concluded that they can crush the Iraqi people's will to resist occupation and legitimise a puppet regime next January by occupying Falluja. Maybe they imagine they can emulate the British forces that terrorised Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1920s by obliterating recalcitrant villages.     "The Guardian"

As the bloody assault on Fallujah continues, the mainstream media has become a propaganda arm of the beseiging US army and its puppet Iraqi forces. We are fed “news” from “embedded journalists” in the beseiging armies. Green Left Weekly seeks to bring you the stories the ruling elite don't want you to hear. Below are some links to alternative news sources which are operating independently of these armies. If you want to suggest other links please send them here. We are also collating details of Australian protests against the attack on Fallujah.

A US-led attack on the Iraqi Sunni-stronghold will breach the Geneva conventions, writes Tony Kevin.
We need to be clear on what is about to happen in the Iraqi city of Falluja, about 64 kilometres west of Baghdad and a key centre of Sunni population in Iraq. This city has for many months held out as a centre of Sunni-based political-military resistance, refusing to accept the authority either of the former US-led occupying authority nor, since July, of the interim Iraqi administration led by the Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi.

.....A medical dispensary in the city centre was bombed earlier.
I don't know what has happened to the doctors and patients who were there.
It was last place you could get medical attention because the big hospital on the outskirts of Falluja was captured by the Americans on Monday. ......

World to US as Americans prepare to level Fallujah
Bush's Sword of Damocles is poised above the people and city of Fallujah , ready to wreak the pent-up wrath his addled brain thinks his tainted election victory permits. This is the bizarre world-in-a-bubble in which most Americans reside. With a chorus of Onward, Christian Soldiers and a vapid, cheerleading press, the crusade continues unabated, as the world's revulsion continues to grow.

MoD still publicly claims DU weapons are safe. However the UK army has issued a card to soldiers saying it can cause ill-health.
“A UN subcommission has ruled that the use of DU breaches the Geneva Convention and the Genocide Convention. DU has also been blamed for the effect of Gulf War syndrome among some 200,000 US troops.” About 29,000 UK troops could also be contaminated.

CLAIMS by the Ministry of Defence that depleted uranium (DU) is not a risk to life have been undermined by a Sunday Herald investigation that found the British army is telling soldiers in Iraq that it can cause ill-health.
The revelation has outraged the military, scientists and politicians. Studies have shown DU leads to cancers, birth defects, memory loss, damage to the immune system and neuro-psychotic disorders. But the MoD has claimed since the first Gulf war that “DU does not pose a risk to health or the environment”.
However, military sources have passed an MoD card to the Sunday Herald which is being handed to troops on active service in Iraq. It reads: “You have been deployed to a theatre where depleted uranium (DU) munitions have been used. DU is a weakly radioactive heavy metal which has the potential to cause ill-health. You may have been exposed to dust containing DU during your deployment.

This DU-PLICITY article shows how the US and UK have lied about the long-lingering killing properties, about 4.5 billion years, of the radioactive Depleted Uranium weapons. Both countries have used them Iraq and in 5 previous conflicts.

.......The Conference called for the abolition of all uranium weapons and confirmed acceptance of the United Nations Sub-commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights finding, that Depleted Uranium weapons are illegal. Accordingly, the Hamburg officially called for the abolition of the use of and halt to the proliferation of these weapons.
The Hamburg Conference concluded: “The evidence from scientists, medical professionals and legal experts at this conference is clear: DU is causing significant health effects worldwide... is illegal under existing International Law and Conventions” The Conference also called for the cessation of the manufacture testing, or use of these weapons. This was the final and unanimous agreement of Conference.

More than 100,000 Iraqis have been killed - and where is our shame and rage?
The full scale of the human cost already paid for the war o­n Iraq is o­nly now becoming clear. Last week's estimate by investigators, using credible methodology, that more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians - most of them women and children - have died since the US-led invasion is a profound moral indictment of our countries. The US and British governments quickly moved to cast doubt o­n the Lancet medical journal findings, citing other studies. These mainly media-based reports put the number of Iraqi civilian deaths at about 15,000 - although the basis for such an endorsement is unclear, since neither the US nor the UK admits to collecting data o­n Iraqi civilian casualties.

Weapons Dust Worries Iraqis
Despite assurances from the U.S. military that depleted uranium from exploded munitions does not pose a significant health threat, Iraq's provisional government is asking the United Nations for help cleaning up the low-level radioactive, metal dust spread across local battlefields by U.S. and British forces during the Persian Gulf wars.
The request comes as the United States continues to defend depleted uranium weaponry - prized for its tank-piercing and bunker- or cave-smashing ability - against strong opposition by other countries, scientists and veterans organizations.
Great Britain, a major partner in the coalition now fighting in Iraq, has provided the U.N. with the coordinates where its forces used depleted uranium, also known as DU, in southern Iraq, but the United States has not. Britain and Germany are supplying money to train Iraqis in environmental science. The United Nations plans to survey for DU hot spots from both wars in Iraq and says it needs the coordinates for an effective survey.

President George W Bush's response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has been a world-wide campaign to kill or capture the Muslim enemies of America - his so-called "global war on terror." It is an ambitious but, in my view, a profoundly misguided affair which has left the United States more hated, more isolated, and certainly no safer than before. Everything that could go wrong with Bush's "war" has gone wrong.
The biggest blunder was, of course, to switch the focus of America's military effort from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein - from Al-Qaeda to Iraq - although there was no connection between the two and no credible evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction or posed any sort of immediate threat to anyone. The result was the catastrophic war in Iraq which has drained America's resources, destroyed its reputation and brought untold miseries to the Iraqis. There is, as yet, no clear outcome in sight.

If Bush gets a second term, he may launch more and wider wars (Iran, Syria etc), provoke retaliation and 'terrorism' and probable use of nuclear weapons and a potential general disaster from which the world as we know it, may never recover.

Be sure to read this great article from the former dean of the White House Press corps, Helen Thomas.
"It turns out ...that even Arabs will fight for their own land.
They are what we call the insurgents, or terrorists, or even the enemy."

"Press Failed to Hold White House Accountable"
........I believe that if he is reelected, we have doomed ourselves to perpetual war in the 21st century. We will have a repetition of the 20th Century. Two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, and every thing that happened at the turn of the century before. Of course he will re-institute the draft. He has to, they are scraping the bottom of the barrel now for ready reserves. He will dismantle the Social Security system little by little with privatizing. He will continue to erode labor rights. He has already practically wiped out overtime. If he makes you a vice president or a supervisor, you won’t get any overtime. Or he’ll give you comp time, even if you don’t want comp time – even if you want to support and feed your kids… He will continue to move jobs to the Third World where multi-millionaires can fatten their pocketbooks from sweatshops and child labor. And, of course, the richest people in the country will continue to get the biggest tax cuts.
So through Bush policies, we have lost most of our friends and allies in the world. At the least, we have lost their respect. And domestically, the poor, the sick, and the maimed will be forgotten. I believe, like Abraham Lincoln, that government should do for people what people cannot do for themselves. I will conclude my rant by quoting John F. Kennedy after the Cuban Crisis. In 1962 he went to American University and made a speech where he said “America would never start a war. We want a world where the weak are secure and the strong are just.”
The other quote that I like so much is “The only way for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing.”
Finally, from early in our Colonial era, was the observation by Alexis De Tocqueville, who said “America is great because it is good. When it ceases to be good, it will no longer be great.”
We can change all that if we give peace a chance.

Any Iraqi resistance to US slaughter is called "terrorism" and used by the US to justify even more violence.
The US is prepared to use "shock and awe" tactics in their efforts to annihilate any resistance in Fallujah.

British Study Concludes That 100,000 Civilian Deaths Have Been Caused By Iraq War's Violence 
"...it is clear that whatever planning did take place was grievously in error.  The invasion of Iraq, the displacement of a cruel dictator, and the attempt to impose a liberal democracy by force have, by themselves, been insufficient to bring peace and security to the civilian population. ... [I]mperialism has resulted in more deaths, not fewer.  This political failure continues to cause scores of casualties among non-combatants. ... The lives of Iraqis are currently being shaped by the policies of the occupying forces and the military insurgents.  For the occupiers, winning the peace now demands a thorough reappraisal of strategy and tactics to prevent further unnecessary casualties.  -Dr. Richard Horton's commentary, "The War In Iraq: Civilian Casualties, Political Responsibilities," in The Lancet, Vol. 364, No. 9445. [1]

"Los Angeles Times" -- WASHINGTON - Moving into an area of clandestine activity that traditionally has been the domain of the CIA, the Pentagon has secured new authority that allows U.S. special operations forces to dole out millions of dollars in cash, equipment and weapons to international warlords and foreign fighters.

US diplomats in Qatar were given a copy of a videotape of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden before it aired on Al-Jazeera television and unsuccessfully sought to prevent the Arabic-language network from broadcasting it, a senior State Department official said on Friday.
"They seem to have aired only excerpts," said the official, a fluent Arabic speaker who watched the complete broadcast on Al-Jazeera.

"In August 2004, the United States Congress unanimously adopted a resolution labeling the situation in Darfur as genocide. On September 9, American Secretary of State Colin Powell in turn declared before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, "[that] genocide has taken place and may still be continuing in Darfur". These declarations echoed attempts to compare events in Darfur with Rwanda in 1994. Observers almost immediately claimed that the American "genocide" declaration had more to do with the US elections than the reality of events in Darfur."
Today a report by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland published in the Lancet estimates (conservatively) 100,000 Iraqis have been killed since the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the (primarily) USA and the UK. Most of these are civilians, women and children.

The Pentagon is collecting figures on local casualties in Iraq, contrary to its public claims, but the results are classified, according to one of the authors of an independent study which reported last week that the war has killed at least 100,000 Iraqis.
"Despite the claim of the head of US Central Command at the time, General Tommy Franks, that 'We don't do body counts', the US military does collect casualty figures in Iraq," said Professor Richard Garfield, an expert on the effects of conflict on civilians. "But since 1991, when Colin Powell was head of the joint chiefs of staff, the figures have been kept secret."

The first scientific study of the human cost of the Iraq war suggests that at least 100,000 Iraqis have lost their lives since their country was invaded in March 2003.
More than half of those who died were women and children killed in air strikes, researchers say. Previous estimates have put the Iraqi death toll at around 10,000 - ten times the 1,000 members of the British, American and multi-national forces who have died so far. But the study, published in The Lancet, suggested that Iraqi casualties could be as much as 100 times the coalition losses. It was also savagely critical of the failure by coalition forces to count Iraqi casualties.

..... These forces are not based on lunatic religious beliefs, but rationally-based on the profits, power and prestige that draw people into the 'military - industrial - political - academic - corporate - media' complex. This is a hugely powerful force. Although it is rationally-based, it is blind to the trends and disastrous consequences of it's own behaviour or how it is used to implement the lunatic religious agenda.

We are moving toward a key fiery moment, and one that carries within it the potential for conflagration. 
As I see them, the key issues are:  Little Men and Power at All Cost
You will add you own realisations here, but the two \'little men\' of the moment are Bush and Putin. 
Small physically and with very different personalities, they have highly significant features in common: -  They rule using fear

The staggering research reported in the British journal Lancet shows the magnitude of the Bush administration’s war crimes: 98,000 Iraqi civilians dead, including 40,000 children. And that’s not even counting Fallujah.
I don’t think most Americans care a lot about dead Iraqis. I hope I’m wrong.

About 100,000 Iraqi civilians - half of them women and children - have died in Iraq since the invasion, mostly as a result of airstrikes by coalition forces, according to the first reliable study of the death toll from Iraqi and US public health experts.

Inquiry to determine whether pentagon improperly awarded bids.
The FBI has begun investigating whether the Pentagon improperly awarded no-bid contracts to Halliburton Co., seeking an interview with a top Army contracting officer and collecting documents from several government offices.
. . . . While the Corps was authorized to spend up to $7 billion for the oil restoration work, the actual cost so far has been $2.5 billion. Halliburton is still working on the oil facilities, but it is now operating under a new, competitively awarded contract.

There is a surreal quality about visiting the United States in the last days of the presidential campaign. If George W Bush wins, according to a scientist I met, who escaped Nazi-dominated Europe, America will surrender many of its democratic trappings and succumb to its totalitarian impulses. If John Kerry wins, according to most Democrat voters, the only mandate he will have is that he is not Bush.

Mike Ruppert, is the author of this article which was delivered to San francisco's prestigious Commonwealth Club on August 31, 2004. He has just published a book "Crossing The Rubicon" in which he presents more details of his 9/11 charges and also on the world's 'Peak Oil' consumption.
Ruppert convincingly establishes that the Bush Administration planned and authorised the 9/11 attacks.

"The 9/11 attacks were the result of deliberate planning and orchestrated efforts by identifiable leaders within the U.S. Government, and the energy and financial sectors, to see a Pearl Harbor-like attack which would provide the American Empire with a pretext for war, invasion and the sequential confiscation of oil and natural gas reserves, or the key transportation routes through which they pass. 9-11 was a premeditated murder and in my book, and here tonight, I will name some of the suspects who committed the crime. In my book I will show you overwhelming evidence of their guilt, which I would be proud and confident to place either before a district attorney or a jury."

By James Glanz, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger.
10/25/04 "New York Times" -- BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 24 - The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, produce missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.
The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no-man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished after the American invasion last year.

To even consider a "pre-emptive nuclear first strike" indicates the flawed thinking of some of the top military and political people in the European Union (EU).

PARIS (Own report) - Military strategists of the European Union define the EU defense strategy initiated by Berlin and are considering a preemptive nuclear first strike. The EU military doctrine initiated by Berlin - the first one in the history of the EU - specifically envisions the possibility of conducting preventive wars. A recently presented "European Defense Paper", written with the participation of a former German minister of state, included nuclear arms in the first strike strategy of the EU. It states that British and French nuclear powers could be included "explicitly or implicitly" in this preventive military option.

The Bushites Are Given A Failing Grade In An Open Letter From 729 "Security Scholars For A Sensible Foreign Policy"
Just when Mr. Bush thought he'd sailed by the Scylla of a potentially devastating foreign-policy critique from John Kerry during the presidential debates, he was hit by the Charybdis of an actually devastating foreign-policy critique from 729 scholars.

As I write this in October, 2004, ton after ton of uranium--depleted uranium, reactor waste, and possibly just uranium--is being burned at high temperature in bullets, missiles and bombs used by the United States military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.  This is generating a global medical crisis the like of which the human race has never seen before.  The breathable uranium oxides created by this massive, ongoing incineration of uranium has radioactive and chemical toxicity for the lifetime of Earth.

of the Iraq quagmire and the war on terror
BERKELEY – The Iraq war is not winnable, a secret U.S. military unit has been "disappearing" people since December 2001, and America has no idea how irreparably its torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison has damaged its image in the Middle East. These were just a few of the grim pronouncements made by Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Seymour "Sy" Hersh to KQED host Michael Krasny before a Berkeley audience on Friday night (Oct. 8).

So it's official: the Iraq crusade was based on a falsity. Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, according to the report of the UN weapons inspectors. The leaders of the coalition of the willing, faced with this embarrassing finding, do not even bother to blush. George Bush says Saddam was a bad guy anyway, and we're safer without him. John Howard sees no reason to apologise: but John Howard never apologises for anything. And Tony Blair simply adds more weasel words to the thousands he has already uttered over Iraq. Truth, so the cliche goes, is the first casualty of war, and the war against terror has proved no exception.

"It's not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without
understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it."   - John Pilger
See also Older Articles    Journalism & Films    Archives

Iraq is probably already lost, says former military-policy planner Mike Turner.
But there are still some smart strategies for Kerry to adopt.
One of the great mysteries of this election is the inability of John Kerry to challenge George W. Bush on his national-security credentials and to hold his administration accountable for its monumental failure in Iraq. These two issues remain the soft underbelly of the Bush campaign. That the Kerry campaign hasn't effectively exploited them is disheartening. That he's allowed Bush to actually spin them into strengths is mind-boggling. Since the American people seem to be buying the GOP's reality-TV version of events in Iraq, let's take a hard look at the military realities.

THE WAR IN IRAQ goes from worse to catastrophic. Hundreds of Iraqis were killed last week, as were two dozen US soldiers. Planned elections in January point less to democracy than civil war. Kidnapping has become a weapon of terror on the ground, matching the terror of US air attacks. An American "take-back" offensive threatens to escalate the violence immeasurably. The secretary general of the United Nations pronounced the American war illegal.

Turning up the campaign rhetoric on Iraq, Sen. John Kerry charged Monday that mistakes by President Bush in invading Iraq could lead to unending war. He said no responsible commander in chief would have waged the war knowing Saddam Hussein didn't possess weapons of mass destruction and wasn't an imminent threat to the United States.
"Yet today, President Bush tells us that he would do everything all over again, the same way. How can he possibly be serious?" Kerry said at New York University.

Former UN secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali held the US administration accountable for rising wave of terrorism, saying Washington’s unilateral approach has fuelled civil wars across the world.
Boutros-Ghali also asked American President George W. Bush to order his forces out of Iraq and to allow Arab countries mediate a peaceful settlement to the crisis gripping the war-scarred country.

 During a BBC radio interview on Wednesday, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan created a controversy by reiterating his long-held position that the Iraq War was illegal because it breached the United Nations Charter.
On Thursday, the imperial leaders of the "Coalition of the Willing" retaliated by vehemently arguing that their Iraq War was, to the contrary, legal.  
Obviously, this dispute raises a legal question: "Whose opinion is correct, and whose is incorrect?"  Additionally, we should be asking ourselves: "Who decides? (i.e., 'Whose jurisprudential opinion shall be dispositive for purposes of resolving this dispute?')" 

(YellowTimes.org) -- The United States went to war against Iraq in 2003 on the basis that Iraq was chock-a-block with '‘weapons of mass destruction’' (WMD). Eventually, the Americans had to admit they were wrong and they just couldn’t find those weapons. Many skeptics suspect the Bush administration lied about the WMDs in Iraq to cover a desire to invade and steal Iraqi oil.

Illegal weapons of mass destruction have not only been found in Iraq but have been used against Iraqis and have even killed US troops.
But Washington and its allies have tried to cover up this outrage because the chief culprit is the US itself, argue American and other experts trying to expose what they say is a war crime.               

The new book "America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and The Global Order" 369 pages, is published by Cambridge University. It is by Stephan Halper and Jonathon Clarke, well-connected foreign policy experts. The review is by Stanley Kutler, author of "The Wars on Watergate" and editor of "The Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century". It was published in the Madison Wisconsin newspaper, "Capital Times" on Sept 12, 2004. It is a brief, and authoritative account of the capture of US foreign policy by Bush and the neocons he has appointed. Their purpose:, "under the guise of a war on terror, to reorder Mideast politics and initiate a new doctrine of pre-emptive war."

With less than 50 days to the US polls and a 10-point lead over John Kerry, George W Bush’s re-election as President looks a breeze. Despite his dodgy past, he has successfully sold himself as a ‘hero’ War President and defender of traditional US values. How did he do it? Bush’s people have run riot over Kerry’s record, so what about the President’s?

Nearly three years ago, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows was born out of a shared belief that America’s military response to the 9/11 attacks which took our loved ones’ lives would result in the deaths of countless innocent civilians and increase recruitment for terrorist causes, making the United States, and the world, less safe and less free for generations to come.

Three years after September 11, President George W Bush's crusade is a failure. "War on terror" is a meaningless myth: you
can't combat a supple attack machine like al-Qaeda with shock and awe. What should have been a long, meticulous police operation was turned by Bush - instigated by his foreign policy adviser, God - into an illegal, preemptive attack on a nation that had nothing to do with terror.
This policy has actually increased terror attacks around the world. Last year in Cairo, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, Sheikh Yamani, a man who knows one or two things about Arabs, violence and oil, said the invasion would produce "one hundred bin Ladens". They are here, and they have no one else but Bush to thank.

1,000 US deaths after Bush announced victory over Iraq, he continues his phoney barbarous war and bombing. Bush has become a war criminal, violating the US constitution, many International Laws, the Nuremberg Charter and the UN Charter.
He has created a tissue of lies to justify an illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, and continued slaughter of Iraqis. The following article on US bombing of Falluja is an example of US barbarity.

Up to six Iraqis have been killed and 24 others injured in US air strikes that have rocked the town of Falluja.
In the first attack late on Tuesday, US jets fired several missiles on Falluja, killing four people and wounding 11 others.
A hospital spokesman said that a child and an elderly man were among the dead.

Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire
The election-year insta-docs keep rising like sunflowers from the Bush admin cow pile; this week, we have a Media Education Foundation–produced primer on neocon world-shaping, post–9-11 skullduggery, and Iraqi Freedom duplicity. More or less a Bud Abbott alternative to Fahrenheit 9/11's Lou Costello, the film sticks closely to well-established facts—the revelation of pre–9-11 plans to attack Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz's age-old rationales for global dominance, the self-contradictory public statements (read: lies) of virtually every major broker on the Bush team, etc.—and nicely, if redundantly, complements the familiar news footage with opinionated talking heads (Chomsky, Mark Crispin Miller, profs, vets, etc.).
Also a comment by Karen Kwiatkowski

IN LATE JULY more than 600 people showed up in Monterey to speak at a Federal Communications Commission hearing on ownership concentration in the news media. The participants were a diverse group, young and old, activists and workers, but they had a single consistent message: the mainstream news media have been doing a deplorable job of covering the day's most important stories.
Read more on DU:

The son of the fortieth president of the United States takes a hard look at the son of the forty-first and does not like what he sees.
It may have been the guy in the hood teetering on the stool, electrodes clamped to his genitals. Or smirking Lynndie England and her leash. Maybe it was the smarmy memos tapped out by soft-fingered lawyers itching to justify such barbarism. The grudging, lunatic retreat of the neocons from their long-standing assertion that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama didn't hurt. Even the Enron audiotapes and their celebration of craven sociopathy likely played a part. As a result of all these displays and countless smaller ones, you could feel, a couple of months back, as summer spread across the country, the ground shifting beneath your feet. Not unlike that scene in The Day After Tomorrow, then in theaters, in which the giant ice shelf splits asunder, this was more a paradigm shift than anything strictly tectonic. No cataclysmic ice age, admittedly, yet something was in the air, and people were inhaling deeply. I began to get calls from friends whose parents had always voted Republican, "but not this time." There was the staid Zbigniew Brzezinski on the staid NewsHour with Jim Lehrer sneering at the "Orwellian language" flowing out of the Pentagon. Word spread through the usual channels that old hands from the days of Bush the Elder were quietly (but not too quietly) appalled by his son's misadventure in Iraq.
See also Bush's Erratic Behavior Worries White House Aides

A death sentence here and abroad
“Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.” - Henry Kissinger, quoted in “Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POW’s in Vietnam”

Last Clear Chance To Chase Down Electronic-Voting Before Its Security-Flaws Bring Down Our Electoral System

Bush, Blair and Howard nuclear gambled with our world, when they "willfully made war and promoted international dissension". Their completely phoney war on Iraq, justified by lies, was followed with a series of war crimes, including more lies, bombing, looting, killing, imprisoning and torturing. It was, and still is, camouflaged by a PR-Psywar campaign, reported by a cowed and co-operative mass media. As recommended by historian H. G. Wells, these "politicians" will be "in the dock" at:

So what's actually happening to Iraq's women? American journalist Lila Rajiva's 7-27-04 OW essay reports that the USA's government-media complex has been steadfastly refusing to investigate beyond the tip of the evidentiary iceberg, or it would have discovered these two barely-submerged facts: (1) that the rape and abduction of Iraqi women has, in fact, skyrocketed in "postwar" Iraq; and (2) that Iraqi women prisoners are, in fact, being raped, abused, and tortured inside the USA's military prisons.

Sibel Edmonds is an amazingly courageous former FBI translator. She lost her job at the FBI for insisting that extremely important information on the 9/11 attacks she came across in her work be correctly interpreted and passed on to the appropriate high-level officials. This information reveals clear foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks not mentioned in the recently released 9/11 Commission report. As I also work as a contract interpreter for the US Department of State, a mutual friend put me in email contact with Sibel several months ago. I have been deeply impressed with her unwavering commitment to honesty and to revealing the truth so that we can avoid another attack on the scale of 9/11. She has been courageously trying to expose this information ever since losing her job, until now working within the constraints of a gag order against her.

If desperation is ugly, then Washington, D.C. today is downright hideous.
As the 9/11 Commission recently reported, there was “no credible evidence” of a collaborative relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. Similarly, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. With U.S. casualties mounting in an election year, the White House is grasping at straws to avoid being held accountable for its dishonesty.

"One would think the physicians in the US military would have learned enough from the cautionary history of the Third Reich's ghoulish Dr. Joseph "The Angel Of Death" Mengele and his team of torture-doctors to know that they should
NEVER practice medicine in violation of universal human rights or their Hippocratic Oath. Evidently, they did not."

A former intelligence analyst has accused the Prime Minister's office of exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
The claim has been made to a federal parliamentary inquiry investigating the accuracy of intelligence about Iraq's banned weapons.   Andrew Wilkie quit the Office of National Assessments in March because he believed the Government was deliberately misleading the public about the case for war.

"Bush is taking powerful drugs to control his depression, erratic behaviour, and paranoia" "Psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank, in his book "Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President wrote that Bush was " a paranoid megalomaniac" and "untreated alcoholic" whose mental capacities are seriously diminished" Couple these with Bush's bizarre Christian Fundamentalist religious beliefs, that the often predicted heavenly armageddon is coming with Israel the centre, when believers like Bush will go straight to heaven and the unbelievers (the rest of us) will rot in hell. An induced nuclear armageddon would be a fulfilment of the Biblical prophecy, or so some fundamentalists believe.

Osha Gray Davidson's article in 28/7/04 Rolling Stone, confirms a previous article by Seymour Hersh (New Yorker journalist) about US employees committing many sexual and other tortures of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, including "raping a teenage boy". The Senate and Pentagon investigation into these tortures uncovered by US Maj. Gen. Antoni Taguba in his report, are now decreed as "classified documents. The investigation is stalled, probably because the details, which go to the top of the Bush Administration, would be considered so horrific by the average American, that to reveal them would damage Bush's re-election chances.

The new classified military documents offer a chilling picture of what happened at Abu Ghraib -- including detailed reports that U.S. troops and translators sodomized and raped Iraqi prisoners. The secret files -- 106 "annexes" that the Defense Department withheld from the Taguba report last spring -- include nearly 6,000 pages of internal Army memos and e-mails, reports on prison riots and escapes, and sworn statements by soldiers, officers, private contractors and detainees. The files depict a prison in complete chaos. Prisoners were fed bug-infested food and forced to live in squalid conditions; detainees and U.S. soldiers alike were killed and wounded in nightly mortar attacks; and loyalists of Saddam Hussein served as guards in the facility, apparently smuggling weapons to prisoners inside.

It appears that the torturing of Iraq’s children is now a part of the Bush cabals “policy” of “bringing democracy, liberation and freedom” to the Iraqi people. This goes way past just simply outrageous.
Of the 535 members of congress, only one member has a child in Iraq, or in uniform for that matter. Not one within the executive branch can make any claim as not one of their children is in uniform, let alone in Iraq.
These are the people sending your sons and daughters off to kill and be killed in this Bush murderous mis-adventure in Iraq.

How do you explain the indefinite imprisonment of children, and sodomizing them, in Abu Ghraib prison in Bagdad?
Is that the way to "the hearts and minds" of those Bush wants to help; the way to introduce "freedom and democracy" to the oppressed victims of Saddam Hussein.? No?
There may be an overall Bush-neocom purpose in continuing the long litany of tortures, and taking their unlimited bestiality to new extrmes.

Seymour Hersh : "The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."
Comment :-
Seymour Hersh is the veteran journalist who exposed US tortures at Abu Ghraib prison, in the US magazine: New Yorker. This latest torture expose of sodimizing screaming boys in Abu Ghraib is particularly foul. The long list of crimes and now this one, adds fuel to my accusation that the US is trying to promote Arab hatred of the US. This will result in more resistance and acts of violence, which the US refers to as "acts of terrorism". It will breed a civil war situation in Iraq. There would be the US and allies supporting their new appointed Government in Bagdad against any forces that oppose the Bagdad regime.

The 1988 gassing of Kurds in the village of Halabja has stood as the most oft-repeated charge against deposed president Saddam Hussein, yet even as Hussein stood before a US-established Iraqi court July 1, Iraqi doctors and ailing survivors told The Chicago Tribune that Halabja's plight was ignored during the period of official US occupation.
"This town has been totally destroyed in terms of the people's health physically and psychologically," Dr. Fouad Baban, an Iraqi surgeon and academic, told the Tribune. "Nothing has been done to help these people -- not by the Americans, not by the international community and not by the Kurdish regional government."

Despite promises of over $1 billion in US funding, hospital patients in Iraq continue to suffer ongoing hardship. Problems plaguing Iraqi hospitals fifteen months into what has been a brutal, bloody occupation range from ongoing medicine and equipment shortages to an overall lack of proper medical infrastructure.
"We are getting less medical supplies now than we were during the sanctions," said Dr. Namin Rashid, the Chief Resident Doctor at Yarmouk Hospital. "Paul Bremer came here and talked a lot at the beginning of the occupation, but nothing has changed," Rashid added, referring to the recently departed civilian administrator of the Coalition Provision Authority.

The authors urge that George W. Bush, Tony Blair, John Howard committed war crimes, referred to Paragraph 1 (c), Article 5 of "Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court"(hereinafter "Rome Statute") and must be indicted.

Attempts by the White House to defuse the Iraq torture scandal by claiming that the prisoner abuse didn’t represent US policy have unravelled in the face of more evidence that US President George Bush and members of his cabinet had a direct hand in devising a post-9/11 policy of torture.