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Saturday, May 31, 2003
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The Sun Newspaper Online - UK's biggest selling newspaper: Photos from UK soldier in Iraq show torture and sexual abuse of Iraqi POWs
Big scandal in Britain: a UK soldier brought in pictures that revealed torture and sexual abuse of iraqi POWS to be developed and a young woman in the photo shop called the cops and told the papers the story!
The Sun Newspaper Online - UK's biggest selling newspaper
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Bush Urges Europeans to Work With U.S.
Bush continues his arrogant and aggressive attitudes, telling Europeans to get onto HIS program, what a world historical disaster and national embarassment
Bush Urges Europeans to Work With U.S.
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Europe Awaits, With Bated Breath
As Bush travels to Europe, major newspapers attack him, citing blows to his credibility
Europe Awaits, With Bated Breath
Excerpt: "Meanwhile, some newspapers have been treating the failure of American forces to find chemical and biological weapons in Iraq as a serious blow to the Bush administration's credibility and will harm prospects for future cooperation between Europe and the United States.
In an editorial today, The Financial Times assailed the Bush administration and British intelligence over the the weapons that Washington insisted for weeks would soon be found in Iraq.
"It is time for a reality check," the newspaper wrote. "We have been deceived."
Referring to "weapons of mass destruction," the conservative newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote in an editorial today:
"America and Great Britain grounded their military operation on the argument that the dictator in Baghdad was building W.M.D., that no inspections regime could really do anything about it and, given the seriousness of the threat, there was no time to lose. Since the end of the war, much has been unearthed to show the criminal nature of the Hussein regime, and that gives moral justification to a regime change. But up to now there has been no evidence for the W.M.D. that were used as grounds for war."
The newspaper argued that the Bush administration's justification for the war had crumbled, and American "credibility and legitimacy" were therefore weakened"
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Friday, May 30, 2003
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Allied use of cluster bombs illegal, minister admits and WMD just a "convenient excuse"
News Excerpt: "The Government admitted during the war on Iraq that the use of cluster bombs against civilian targets would "not be legal", a letter obtained by The Independent has revealed."
and Wolfowitz admits that "WMD just a convenient excuse for war
While Jake Tapper tells how US allies are getting madder and madder at US comments on failure to find WMD
in a Salon story
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Salam's story
The Baghdad blogger is finally tracked down! The Guardian tells the story and will start featuring the writer! Excerpt: "Salam's story.The most gripping account of the Iraq conflict came from a web diarist known as the Baghdad Blogger. But no one knew his identity - or even if he existed. Rory McCarthy finally tracked him down, and found a quietly spoken, 29-year-old architect. From next week he will write fortnightly in G2"
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Salam's story
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Thursday, May 29, 2003
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US Death Camps?
Carolyn Kay sends a frightening report that Guantanamo prison camps could be death camps; from
Brisbane Courier-Mail, Australia
US plans death camp
26may03
THE US has floated plans to turn Guantanamo Bay into a death camp, with its own death row and execution chamber.
Prisoners would be tried, convicted and executed without leaving its boundaries, without a jury and without right of appeal, The Mail on Sunday newspaper reported yesterday.
The plans were revealed by Major-General Geoffrey Miller, who is in charge of 680 suspects from 43 countries, including two Australians.
The suspects have been held at Camp Delta on Cuba without charge for 18 months.
General Miller said building a death row was one plan. Another was to have a permanent jail, with possibly an execution chamber…
Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com
“A cynic might say that the only thing Republicans have to fear is the end of fear itself.” – E.J. Dionne, Washington Post, May 25, 2003
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White House insider cleans up Bush's image on film
Via: Globe & Mail
Trapped on the other side of the country aboard Air Force One, the President has lost his cool: "If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come and get me! I'll be at home! Waiting for the bastard!" His Secret Service chief seems taken aback. "But Mr. President . . ." The President brusquely interrupts him. "Try Commander-in-Chief. Whose present command is: Take the President home!" Was this George W. Bush's moment of resolve on Sept. 11, 2001? Well, not exactly. Actually, the scene took place this month, on a Toronto sound stage.
The histrionics, filmed for a two-hour television movie to be broadcast this September, are as close as you can get to an official White House account of its activities at the outset of the war on terrorism. Written and produced by a White House insider with the close co-operation of Mr. Bush and his top officials, the movie The Big Dance represents an unusually close merger of Washington's ambitions with the Hollywood entertainment machinery. A copy of the script obtained by The Globe and Mail reveals a prime-time drama starring a nearly infallible, heroic president with little or no dissension in his ranks and a penchant for delivering articulate, stirring, off-the-cuff addresses to colleagues.
That the whole thing was filmed in Canada and is eligible for financial aid from Canadian taxpayers, and that its loyal Republican writer-producer is a Canadian citizen best known for his adaptation of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz , are ironies that will be lost on most of its American viewers when it airs on the Showtime network this fall. ...Yet compared with other journalistic accounts of the period, the movie is clearly an effort to reconstruct Mr. Bush as a determined and principled military leader. The public image of Mr. Bush — who avoided military service in Vietnam and who has often been derided as a doe-eyed naif on satirical TV shows — is a key concern to White House communications officials, many of them friends of Mr. Chetwynd.
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Blair is savaged for his failed Iraq policy
News
See "The case for war is blown apart"
By Ben Russell and Andy McSmith in Kuwait City
29 May 2003
Excerpt: "Tony Blair stood accused last night of misleading Parliament and the British people over Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and his claims that the threat posed by Iraq justified war.
Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, seized on a "breathtaking" statement by the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, that Iraq's weapons may have been destroyed before the war, and anger boiled over among MPs who said the admission undermined the legal and political justification for war."
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Wednesday, May 28, 2003
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Troops claim that "vaccines poisoned us"
More on claims that new Gulf war syndrome is emerging
ThisisLondon
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US 'mini nukes' decision alarms critics
There has not been much outcry over Bush decision to create a new generation of mininukes. Excerpt: "The Bush administration has won a big victory in its push to start research into a new generation of low-yield and bunker-busting nuclear weapons - which critics say would increase the risk of global nuclear proliferation"
News
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Tuesday, May 27, 2003
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Trust in the Military Heightens Among Baby Boomers' Children
I don't believe it -- just because a well-to-do suburb of Washington DC has students who trumpet back the messages from the waves of advertising being done by the US military in all walks of media life doesn't mean that the youth are pro-military. In fact, I would argue (in the spirit of the non-science of this NY Times piece that the fact that some students were speaking of "imperialism" means that critical educators are not losing the war for the minds of the young...The topic in John Sunderdick's leadership class at Mount Hebron High School in Ellicott City, Md., was the military. The first task was word association.
"Just write down the first word that pops into your head" connected to the military, Mr. Sunderdick, 25, said.
The results would have gladdened the heart of any recruiter:
"Strong," "bravery," "proud to be an American," "service," "Bush," "really hard workouts" and "heroes."
A few students wrote negatives like "blood" and "imperialism." But by and large, the class of 18 sophomores and juniors voiced a striking degree of confidence in the military.
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| Red Cross denied access to PoWs
Just as the rogue US regime holds hundreds of prisoners from the Afghan war illegally in Cuba, so too are Red Cross denied access to Iraqi prisoners near Baghdad
See Guardian story
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Stating the Obvious
Paul Krugman goes after "lunatic" extreme right Republican economics and politics
Stating the Obvious
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'Gulf war syndrome' soldiers threaten legal action
The beginning of reports and threats of legal action for Gulf War II syndrome; there are over 160,000 vets from Gulf War I who are sick, disabled or dead
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | 'Gulf war syndrome' soldiers threaten legal action
Brits claim that US military prioritized "safety first" for US soldiers, putting Brit soldiers at risk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,964014,00.html
And Britain blames the US for continued anarchy in Iraq
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/dailybriefing/story/0,12965,962526,00.html
***
Finally, UN nuke inspectors are coming in after US failed to protect at least 7 Iraqi nuclear sites that were looted; note, though, that the US still doesn't want to let in Hans Blix and his arms inspectors
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,963769,00.html
Indeed, Blix now claims that he believes Iraq has no WMD, suggesting that whole US/UK alibi was a fraud
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,962535,00.html
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Monday, May 26, 2003
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10 weeks on and still no 'smoking gun'
Via: Straits Times
RUTBAH (Iraq) -- Frustrated weapons hunters are turning away from outdated US intelligence leads, which have failed to turn up any evidence of chemical, biological or nuclear arms in Iraq after 10 weeks. Teams are now moving towards their own intelligence gathering, based on interviews with Iraqi scientists, factory workers and even neighbours who lived near shadowy operations once run by Saddam Hussein. The switch comes at a time of lowered expectations and increased frustration among the searchers. US President George W. Bush has said he began the war to disarm Saddam. But there has been no sign of either the ousted leader or the weapons he long denied having.
In the war's early days, American officers said they expected to find such huge stockpiles of unconventional weapons that their main concern was whether they had enough people to destroy the materials. 'It never occurred to anyone, not even for 10 seconds, that we wouldn't find any,' said Captain David Norris, who heads Mobile Exploitation Team Charlie (MET-C). The team -- one of four originally assigned to analyse evidence of weapons of mass destruction -- is no longer part of the search. Its criminal investigators, linguists and counterintelligence experts are now looking for evidence of crimes against humanity that Saddam's regime may have committed...
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No More Nukes
From: Washington Post editorial:
The Bush administration succeeded last week in advancing one of its most radical, dangerous and underdebated policy ideas. Shrugging off objections from a handful of Democrats, both the House and the Senate approved legislative language removing a decade-old ban on research into a new class of "low-yield" nuclear weapons and authorizing $15 million for the study of another category of "robust" warheads designed for underground targets. The administration insists it wants only to pursue research on the new nukes. But even this research will, at a minimum, multiply the incentives for rogue states and rival powers to build nuclear arsenals of their own -- a trend that President Bush has rightly defined as the most serious danger of the new century. At worst, the administration will succeed in making nuclear war easier and more tempting, both for the United States and for other powers -- an outcome at odds with any reasonable understanding of national security or morality.
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Sunday, May 25, 2003
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FAA Delay in Reporting 9/11 Hijackings Probed, Commission also questions ex-chief on shooting report
VIA: Newsday
Washington - The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks grilled the former chief federal aviation regulator yesterday in a tense public exchange over whether the government bungled its response that day. Jane Garvey, former head of the Federal Aviation Administration, was asked pointedly by commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste why the agency apparently took a half-hour to notify the country's air defense command about the hijackings. Another commissioner, Fred Fielding, pressed Garvey about an FAA report from Sept. 11 that a hijacker on American Airlines Flight 11 fatally shot a passenger five minutes before the plane smashed into theWorld Trade Center. The federal government has said no guns were on any ofthe four planes and that hijackers had only box cutters.
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Rice Quoted Saying U.S. to Ignore Schroeder
More inflammatory world diplomacy from the Bush administration -- here they quite clearly seek to undermine the Social Democratic / Green coalition in Germany, in favor of rightist groups. The pressure being exerted by the United States upon the EU right now is a major test for that international bloc. Can a single-minded American administration can play the rule of divide and conquer against as mighty a power as the EU? Will they unite against this attempt or will they make Judas deals and sell each other out for an expedient buck and future concessions?Condoleezza Rice was quoted in a German magazine Sunday saying the Bush administration was trying to patch up strained relations with Germany but would continue to ostracize Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
Focus magazine reported President Bush's national security adviser told a German visitor recently that relations between Bush and Schroeder were ruined because of the German leader's outspoken opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
"We're now doing everything we can to improve relations to Germany at all levels," the unnamed German visitor quoted Rice as saying. "But we're going to work around the chancellor. It's better to leave him out."
"The Bush-Schroeder relationship will never be what it was and what it should be," Rice was quoted as saying in Focus.
She was also quoted as saying that Bush was aware of Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's past as a street-fighter turned politician and doesn't believe he is suited to be a statesman...
...Rice has been widely quoted telling associates that resulting U.S. policy should be: "Punish France, ignore Germany and forgive Russia." Via: Reuters
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Saturday, May 24, 2003
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The Baghdad Deal
From: Asia Times Online
Much of the world was surprised. After the spirited resistance in the south of Iraq, how could Baghdad possibly have fallen in only two days?
An Asia Times Online investigation in Baghdad, Tikrit and Najaf has yielded a clear certainty among Iraqis, both Sunni and Shi'ite, as to the answer: The Pentagon and the Ba'ath Party leadership made a safqua ("secret deal" in Arabic) for the (almost) bloodless fall of Baghdad. Crucially, this safqua may have included a package of American green cards for top Republican and Special Republican Guard commanders and their families.
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BushCo Reams Nation Good: No WMDs after all, no excuse for war, too late for anyone to care anymore. Ha-ha, suckers
From the SF GATE:
Ha-ha-ha oh man did we ever get smacked on that one. Conned big time. Punk'd like dogs. Just gotta shake your head, laugh it off. They reamed us but good, baby! Damn.
Turns out it really was all a big joke after all. The war, that is. All a big fat nasty murderous oil-licking lie, a sneaky little power-mad game with you as the sucker and the world as the pawn and BushCo as the slithery war thug, the dungeon master, the prison daddy. You really have to laugh. Because it's just so wonderfully ridiculous. In a rather disgusting, soul-draining sort of way.
See, there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. No WMDs at all. Isn't that great? What's more: There never were. Ha-ha-ha. Gotcha!
No warehouses teeming with nuclear warheads, no underground bunkers packed with vats of boiling biotoxins, no drums of crazy-ass chemical agents that will melt your skin and turn us all into drooling flesh-eating zombies -- unless, of course, you count the sneering vat of conservative biotoxin that is, say, Fox News, in which case, hell yeah baby, we gotcher WMDs right here beeyatch.
Go figure. Those lowly U.N. inspectors were right after all. Who knew? It was all a ruse. We've been sucker-punched and ideologically molested and patriotically sodomized and hey, what the hell, who cares anyway, we "liberated" an oppressed people most Americans secretly loathe and fear and don't understand in the slightest, even though that was never the point, or the justification, or the goal. Go team.
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Thank You Tony...
The Washington Times has put together this happy little web site for Americans to express their undying thanks to Tony Blair for his support for the War on Iraq. Here's what I wrote him:Thanks Tony,
For delineating that the lines of Western global imperialism, as highlighted by someone like W.E.B. DuBois even a century ago, still stand effective today. Thanks for serving as the articulate mouthpiece for a US President who's own ethics on the matter could hardly ever raise themselves above "We're making progress" or "We're gonna get 'em." Your intervening as the intelligent Brit in this regard really did wonders for the War's domestic media sell. Thank you also, then, for helping to entrench a dominant neoliberal rightist regime in America, even though you stand for a more Third Way moderatism in the UK...bellying up to this extreme economical right-wing in America as you have done is really helping the U.S. working class to see that just because a political party has one's name on it, doesn't mean that they intend one any good will. Finally, then, for the great mass of Americans who cringed and gasped as President Bush landed upon a victorious aircraft carrier in jumpers -- all smiles, leader of the free world, media beaming with false pride as the dollars flowed -- thanks for nothing...
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Friday, May 23, 2003
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Afghans' Uranium Levels Spark Alert
Extremely high levels of uranium urine toxicity are being found in randomly selected Afghani people. The DOD's spokesperson has responded by denying causality AND (this is the outrageous part) denying that the US has used any DU weapons in Afghanistan whatsoever! This has some critics worried, however, that the toxicity may be resulting from some form of new weapon that the military is intimating in a rather backhanded fashion...
Read it at Vegan Blog...
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