09-20-2009 • Gateway Pundit

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WASHINGTON, Sept 10 (Reuters) – By most counts, the death toll of U.S. soldiers in America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stood at 5,157 in the second week of September. Add at least 1,360 private contractors working for the U.S. and the number tops 6,500.

Contractor deaths and injuries (around 30,000 so far) are rarely reported but they highlight the United States’ steadily growing dependence on private enterprise.

It’s a dependence some say has slid into incurable addiction. Contractor ranks in Iraq and Afghanistan have swollen to just under a quarter million. They outnumber U.S. troops in Afghanistan and they almost match uniformed soldiers in Iraq.

The present ratio of about one contractor for every uniformed member of the U.S. armed forces is more than double that of every other major conflict in American history, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

That means the world’s only superpower cannot fight its war nor protect its civilian officials, diplomats and embassies without support from contractors.

“As the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have progressed, the military services, defense agencies and other stakeholder agencies…continue to increase their reliance on contractors. Contractors are now literally in the center of the battlefield in unprecedented numbers,” according to a report to Congress by the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“In previous wars, the military police protected bases and the battle space as other military service members engaged and pursued the enemy,” said the report.

In listing the 1,360-plus contractor casualties, it said that criticism of the present system and suggestions for reforming it “in no way diminish their sacrifices.”

So why are they not routinely added to military casualty counts? And why should they? A full accounting for total casualties is important because both Congress and the public tend to gauge a war’s success or failure by the size of the force deployed and the number of killed and wounded, according to George Washington university scholar Steven Schooner.

In other words: the higher the casualty number, the more difficult it is for political and military leaders to convince a sceptical public that a war is worth fighting, particularly a war that promises to be long, such as the conflict in Afghanistan. Polls show that a majority of Americans already think the Afghan war is not worth fighting.

Figures on deaths and injuries among the vast ranks of civilians in war zones are tracked by the U.S. Department of Labor on the basis of claims under an insurance policy, the Defense Base Act, which all U.S. contracting companies and subcontractors must take out for the civilians they employ outside the United States.

EXPENDABLE PROFITEERS, ROGUES?

The Labor Department compiles the statistics on a quarterly basis but only releases them in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act. This can take weeks. The Department gives no details of the nationalities of the contractors, saying that doing so would “constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy” under the U.S. Privacy Act.

Writing in last autumn’s Parameters, the quarterly journal of the U.S. Army War College, Schooner said that an accurate tally was critical to any discussion of the costs and benefits of the military’s efforts in the wars. What’s more, the American public needs to know that their government is delegating to the private sector “the responsibility to stand in harm’s way and, if required, die for America.”

Schooner wrote it was troubling that few Americans considered the deaths of contractors relevant or significant even though many of them performed roles carried out by uniformed military only a generation ago. “Many…concede that they perceive contractor personnel as expendable profiteers, adventure seekers, cowboys, or rogue elements not entitled to the same respect or value due to the military.”

That’s not surprising after a series of ugly incidents involving armed security contractors. They make up for a small proportion of the total (about 8 percent) but account for almost all the headlines that have deepened negative perceptions and prompted labels from mercenary and merchant of death to “the coalition of the billing.”

In the most notorious incident, two years ago, employees of the company then known as Blackwater opened fire in a crowded Baghdad square, killing 17 Iraqis. Five of the Blackwater shooters, who were working for the Department of State, have been indicted on manslaughter and weapons charges.

The Pentagon describes private contractors as a “force multiplier” because they let soldiers concentrate on military missions. Some of the actions of private security contractors could be termed a “perception multiplier.” Such as the after-hours antics of contractors from the company ArmorGroup North America guarding the U.S. embassy in Kabul.

Shaking off the image of rogues became even more difficult for private security contractors after a Washington-based watchdog group, the Project on Government Oversight, accompanied a detailed report on misconduct and morale problems among the guard force with photographs showing nearly nude, drunken employees in a variety of obscene poses and fondling each other.

Whether contractors, even rogue elements and cowboys, should not be counted in the toll of American wars is another matter. Doing so would be part of the transparency Barack Obama promised when he ran for president.

You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com

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Saed Bannoura – IMEMC

August 28, 2009 In an Interview with Haaretz newspaper, Archbishop Desmond Tutu stated that Israel must learn from the Holocaust that it cannot gain security thought fences, walls and guns. Archbishop Tutu was commenting of statement made by Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in Germany, in which he said that “Israel should always defend itself”. Tutu said that “the regime in South Africa never managed to get security from the barrel of the gun, but got security after recognizing and respecting every person”. The Nobel Prize laureate made his statement to Haaretz in Jerusalem and “The Elders” concluded their tour in Israel and Palestine, except the Gaza Strip. The Elders are hoping to be able to visit Gaza in the future. Archbishop Tutu added that the west was consumed with the guilt for what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust, “and they should be, but the people who are paying the price for that are that Palestinians”. He also referred to a meeting he had in the past with a German ambassador who told him that Germany is guilty for two wrongs; what it did to the Jews, and the current suffering of the Palestinians. Archbishop Tutu criticized some Jewish groups in the United States who intimidate any person who criticizes the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and accused them of being anti-Semite. He said that such groups pressured many universities in the United States into cancelling his appearance on their campuses. Tutu added that this is a very unfortunate issue, and that his opinions are derived from the Torah. “God created us on his own image”, he said, “God is always in favor of the oppressed”. Commenting on the a statement made by Professor Neve Gordon, of the Ben-Gurion University, in which he said that selective sanctions should be imposed on Israel, archbishop Tutu stated that sanctions played an important role in fighting apartheid in South Africa. He added that sanctions are one of the most “psychologically powerful instruments”, and that sanctions “hit the pocket of the government in South Africa, when we had the arms, the embargo, and the economic boycott”. The Elders visited the West Bank village of Bil’in, near Ramallah, as dozens of Palestinian, Israeli and international peace activists were holding their weekly nonviolent protest against the Annexation. Archbishop Tutu said that the peace activists in Bil’in remind him of Ghandi, as he managed to overthrow the British rule in India by nonviolent means. Commenting on some Israeli schools refusing to receive Ethiopian Jews in their schools, Tutu stated that he hopes the Israeli society would evolve. During the live webcast on the Elders Website, Archbishop Tutu said that he hopes to see a free Palestine and a secure Israel and added that peace is possible. “We are with yes, and yes, don’t’ give up, don’t give up, peace is possible, and we will be coming to celebrate with you when Palestine is free, and when Israel is free and secure”

Link: www.imemc.org/article/61523

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By Nada Bakri
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 29, 2009

HILLA, Iraq — Maytham Hamzah cast his eyes toward the remains of King Nebuchadnezzar’s guest palace in Babylon, one of the world’s first great cities. He smiled, bitterly.

“They destroyed the whole country,” Hamzah, the head of the Babylon museum, said of U.S. forces in Iraq. “So what are a few old bricks and mud walls in comparison?”

U.S. forces did not exactly destroy the 4,000-year-old city, home of one of the world’s original seven wonders, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Even before the troops arrived, there was not much left: a mound of broken mud-brick buildings and archaeological fragments in a fertile plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.

But they did turn it into Camp Alpha, a military base, shortly after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Their 18-month stay there caused “major damage” and represented a “grave encroachment on this internationally known archeological site,” a report released this month in Paris by the United Nations’ cultural agency, UNESCO, says.

The ruins stretch over a rectangular area measuring 2,100 acres along the western banks of the Euphrates. The site consists of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace, which then-President Saddam Hussein rebuilt in the 1980s; the remains of the Temple of Ninmakh; and a palace for royal guests. In addition, there is the Lion of Babylon, a 2,600-year-old sculpture, and the remains of the Ishtar Gate, the most beautiful of the eight gates that once ringed the perimeter of the town. It still bears the symbols of Babylonian gods.

According to the report, which comes after five years of investigation by a team of Iraqi and international experts, foreign troops and contractors bulldozed hilltops and then covered them with gravel to serve as parking lots for military vehicles and trailers. They drove heavy vehicles over the fragile paving of once-sacred pathways.

The report also says that forces built barriers and embankments to protect the base, pulverizing ancient pottery and bricks that were engraved with cuneiform characters. They dug trenches where they stored fuel tanks for their helicopters, which landed near an ancient theater. Among the structures that suffered the most damage, according to the report, were the Ishtar Gate and a processional thoroughfare. Experts also say troops filled their sandbags with soil from a site that was littered with archaeological fragments.

Bricks were looted as well — both those of Babylonian vintage and newer ones that Hussein used to rebuild parts of the ruins. The latter variety was emblazoned with an ode to himself.

“The damage was so great,” said Maryam Mussa, an official from the Iraqi state board of heritage and antiquities, which is in charge of the site. “It would be so difficult to repair it, and nothing can make up for it.”

Spokesmen for the U.S. military in Iraq did not respond to requests for comment. But the military has previously said that looting would have been far worse had it not been for the presence of its troops. The military also said in 2005 that it had discussed setting up the base with Iraqi archaeologists in charge of the site.

The site has been closed to the public since 2003. Facing mounting criticism from archaeologists in Iraq and around the world, troops vacated it in summer 2004. It was reopened this June, despite warnings from experts that the ruins might suffer further damage unless they were first restored and given proper protection.

Many residents of Hilla, a town 60 miles south of Baghdad that sits near the ruins, said they have not been to the site because they can’t bear to see the damage.

“What ruins are you talking about?” said Jawad Kathem, a 55-year-old owner of a small grocery store in the village of Jumjumah, a few miles away. “There is nothing left of it. It was all destroyed and looted.”

“They are occupying forces,” said Sabah Hassan, a 41-year-old resident of Hilla who owns a cafe near the ruins. “Nobody can tell them what to do.”

On a recent day, wind swept across the deserted ruin as Hamzah, the museum’s head, gave a tour to visitors. He recited the history of ancient Babylon with the enthusiasm of someone who had been waiting for years to share his knowledge. The gates of the museum were locked.

“From this room, King Nebuchadnezzar ruled his kingdom,” he said as he waved his hand across a spacious room where Nebuchadnezzar II is believed to have sat. The king turned Babylon into one of the wonders of the ancient world. Historians say he was prouder of his construction projects than he was of his many military victories.

Several efforts to restore Babylon have been announced in the past six years, but none has made progress. Now, with security in Iraq improving, officials hope to start work on a $700,000, two-year project funded by the U.S. State Department to restore the site. The United Nations is also trying to name the place a World Heritage site, a designation that would provide support and protection.

“Of course this is not enough, but it is better than nothing,” lamented Mussa, the site director. “We had hoped that work would start this year.”

On her desk were papers detailing the damage, gathering dust.

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Patrick Cockburn
Counterpunch
Friday, June 19, 2009

Furious protests are threatening to undermine the Iraqi government’s plan to give international oil companies a stake in its giant oilfields in a desperate effort to increase its declining oil production and oil revenues.

In less than two weeks time, on June 29 and 30, the Iraqi Oil minister Hussain Shahristani will award service contracts to the world’s largest oil companies to develop six of Iraq’s largest oil producing fields over 20-25 years.

Senior figures within the Iraqi oil industry have denounced the deal. Fayad al-Nema, the director of the South Oil Company, which comes under the Oil Ministry and produces most of Iraq’s crude, said last weekend: “The service contracts will put the Iraqi economy in chains and shackle its independence for the next 20 years. They squander Iraq’s revenues.” Mr Nema is reported to have since been fired because of his opposition to the contracts, which he says is shared by many other officials in Iraq’s state-owned oil industry.

The government maintains that it is not compromising the ownership of Iraq’s huge oil reserves – the third in the world at 115 billion barrels – on which the country is wholly dependent to fund its recovery from 30 years of war, sanctions and occupation. But the fall in the price of oil over the last year has left the government facing a devastating financial crisis in which 80 per cent of its revenues goes to pay for salaries, food rations and recurrent costs. Almost nothing is left for reconstruction and it is finding it hard to pay even for vitally-needed items such as electrical plant from GE and Siemens.

The development of Iraq’s oil reserves is of great importance to the world’s energy supply in the 21st century. They may be even larger than Saudi Arabia’s, as there was little exploration while Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussein. International oil companies are desperate to get their foot in the door. “Everyone wants to be in Iraq,” says Ruba Husari, an expert on Iraqi oil. “Togethor with Iran this is the only oil province in the world that has great potential. It is a great opportunity for oil companies because nobody knows the size of Iraq’s reserves. Iraq itself needs to know what is under its soil.”

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Iraq�s refugees; the region�s largest displacement crisis goes on

World Vision Middle East/Eastern Europe/ Central Asia office

June 20, 2009 Some 2 million Iraqi refugees across the Middle East will spend a fifth World Refugee Day far from home and even further from any prospect of return or a better life as their needs and rights continue to go largely unaddressed. ‘Exposure to violence, instability and disrupted education characterise the childhoods of many of Iraq’s refugee children � some of whom can no longer call Iraq home because of what they experienced there’, says Siobhan Kimmerle, Programme Director for World Vision in Jordan. ‘We must not turn our backs to their needs, which require long term interventions’, she added. Lack of prospects for Iraqi refugees to return because of instability, or to integrate into host communities, coupled with the effects of the global economic crisis, including rising food and commodity prices, are exacerbating their sense of vulnerability and displacement in countries like Jordan, which still hosts some 500,000 Iraqi refugees or 8% of its population, according to the UNHCR Global Report 2008. Jordan’s hospitality and generosity towards refugees has been significant, but so too has the strain on resources such as water, which is already lacking for its own population, as well as its already under-resourced health and education systems. Both the governments of Jordan and Syria claim that hosting Iraqi refugees has cost them up US$1 billion per year, according to the report ‘Realizing protection space for Iraqi refugees: UNHCR in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, January 2009′. Despite hosting most of Iraq’s refugees, neither Jordan nor Syria are signatories to the refugee convention. Iraqi refugees are therefore ’subject to the restrictive legislation applicable to foreigners, diminishing the likelihood that their basic rights are upheld’, claims the same report. Without access to a residence permit, refugees in Jordan can’t work and their savings are quickly depleted. Many Iraqi refugee families in Jordan’s second city of Zarqa, rely on supplementary food aid because their usual breadwinners can’t find work or wages from the illegal casual work they resort to are low and irregular. ‘Even with the food aid we do not have enough. I have a big family,’ said Um Raed. ‘It’s not adequate, but it helps’, added the mother of six. Her family was one of 1,250 families in Zarqa that received a monthly supplementary food ration from World Vision, funded by the Government of Germany. ‘In our work with refugees around the world, World Vision prioritises the needs of the most vulnerable, especially children,’ said Jeff Hall, Deputy Advocacy Director for World Vision’s Middle East and Eastern Europe Region. ‘We also take special steps to help the displaced live with dignity despite their rather precarious situation.’ Education for Iraqi refugee children in Jordan is also a significant need and key concern for World Vision, which is providing opportunities for informal learning, recreation and psychosocial support to children in the capital Amman, and the cities of Zarqa and Irbid. “Iraqi children in Jordan are now permitted to attend any school but they are still competing for precious space in overcrowded classrooms, which impacts upon the quality of education children in Jordan receive. Students have also missed a lot of their schooling and need to catch up and then there are some families that can’t afford the transport and school supplies or need their children to work to support the family’, said Siobhan Kimmerle. ‘World Vision is offering an education and recreation programme for 225 children in Zarqa, for example, because without extra tuition in Arabic, English and Maths, these refugee children would really struggle in school’, she added. According to a February 2008 study by the International Organisation for Migration, there is a growing need for psychosocial and psychological support for the refugee population in Jordan � a need that World Vision is trying to meet through recreation centres and Child Friendly Spaces that give children a safe and structured place to express themselves and experience a fuller childhood. ‘Children need a place where they belong � for Iraqi refugee children in Jordan, home is a foreign concept � so these spaces and the opportunity to interact with other children are very important to their sense of wellbeing and development’, explained Kimmerle. World Vision’s programmes are currently supporting some 4,000 Iraqi refugees in Jordan, half of whom are children. The organisation plans to provide assistance to around 15,000 refugees and impoverished Jordanians, but requires adequate funding to implement the activities focusing on food aid, education, psychosocial support and vocational training. World Vision’s approach is designed to not only benefit the Iraqi refugees, but also the communities that are hosting them. Relief and development projects across the Middle East, Central Asia, Balkans and Caucasus are also assisting thousands of refugees and displaced persons with a special focus on children. Additional information ‘At the end of August 2008 more than 300,000 people were registered with UNHCR in the countries surrounding Iraq. However, it is believed that a total of some one to two million Iraqis are living in these countries, mainly in Jordan and Syria. UNHCR is also involved with an estimated 2.8 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) and some 42,000 refugees, including Palestinians, in Iraq. (UNHCR Iraq Situation Update August 2008) ‘The largest displacement crisis in the Middle East since 1948, of approximately two million Iraqi refugees in the region, the UNHCR estimates that at present Syria hosts 1.2 to 1.4 million Iraqis, Jordan 500,000 to 600,000 and Lebanon 20,000 to 30,000.2 These countries have no specific legislation concerning refugees. (’Realizing protection space for Iraqi refugees: UNHCR in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon January 2009).

:: Article nr. 55328 sent on 20-jun-2009 17:52 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=55328

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Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute, the Center for Investigative Reporting and New American Media.

Photo Courtesy of Shaun Bauer

The light is fading from the dusty Baghdad sky as Hassan Mahsan re-enacts what happened to his family last summer. We’re  standing in the courtyard of his concrete-block house, his children are watching us quietly and his wife is twirling large  circles of dough and slapping them against the inside walls of a roaring oven. He walks over to his three-foot-tall daughter  and grabs her head like a melon. As she stands there, he gestures wildly behind her, pretending to tie up her hands, then  pretending to point a rifle at her head. “They took the blindfold off me, pointed the gun at her head and cocked it, saying,  ‘Either you tell us where al-Zaydawi is, or we kill your daughter.’”

“They just marched into our house and took whatever they wanted,” Hassan’s mother says, peeking out the kitchen door. “I’ve  never seen anyone act like this.”

As Hassan tells it, it was a quiet night on June 10, 2008, in Sadr City, Baghdad’s poor Shiite district of more than 2  million people, when the helicopter appeared over his house and the front door exploded, nearly burning his sleeping youngest  son. Before Hassan knew it, he was on the ground, hands bound and a bag over his head, with eight men pointing rifles at him,  locked and loaded.

At first he couldn’t tell whether the men were Iraqis or Americans. He says he identified himself as a police sergeant,  offering his ID before they took his pistol and knocked him to the ground. The men didn’t move like any Iraqi forces he’d  ever seen. They looked and spoke like his countrymen, but they were wearing American-style uniforms and carrying American  weapons with night-vision scopes. They accused him of being a commander in the local militia, the Mahdi Army, before they  dragged him off, telling his wife he was “finished.” But before they left, they identified themselves. “We are the Special  Forces. The dirty brigade,” Hassan recalls them saying.

The Iraq Special Operations Forces (ISOF) is probably the largest special forces outfit ever built by the United States, and  it is free of many of the controls that most governments employ to rein in such lethal forces. The project started in the  deserts of Jordan just after the Americans took Baghdad in April 2003. There, the US Army’s Special Forces, or Green Berets,  trained mostly 18-year-old Iraqis with no prior military experience. The resulting brigade was a Green Beret’s dream come  true: a deadly, elite, covert unit, fully fitted with American equipment, that would operate for years under US command and  be unaccountable to Iraqi ministries and the normal political process.

According to Congressional records, the ISOF has grown into nine battalions, which extend to four regional “commando bases”  across Iraq. By December, each will be complete with its own “intelligence infusion cell,” which will operate independently  of Iraq’s other intelligence networks. The ISOF is at least 4,564 operatives strong, making it approximately the size of the  US Army’s own Special Forces in Iraq. Congressional records indicate that there are plans to double the ISOF over the next  “several years.”

According to retired Lt. Col. Roger Carstens, US Special Forces are “building the most powerful force in the region.” In 2008  Carstens, then a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, was an adviser to the Iraqi National Counter-Terror  Force, where he helped set up the Iraqi counterterrorism laws that govern the ISOF.

“All these guys want to do is go out and kill bad guys all day,” he says, laughing. “These guys are shit hot. They are just  as good as we are. We trained ‘em. They are just like us. They use the same weapons. They walk like Americans.”

When the US Special Forces began the slow transfer of the ISOF to Iraqi control in April 2007, they didn’t put it under the  command of the Defense Ministry or the Interior Ministry, bodies that normally control similar special forces the world over.  Instead, the Americans pressured the Iraqi government to create a new minister-level office called the Counter-Terrorism  Bureau. Established by a directive from Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, the CTB answers directly to him and commands  the ISOF independently of the police and army. According to Maliki’s directive, the Iraqi Parliament has no influence over  the ISOF and knows little about its mission. US Special Forces operatives like Carstens have largely overseen the bureau.  Carstens says this independent chain of command “might be the perfect structure” for counterterrorism worldwide.

Although the force is officially controlled by the Iraqi government, popular perception in Baghdad is that the ISOF–the  dirty brigade–is a covert, all-Iraqi branch of the US military. That reading isn’t far from the truth. The US Special Forces  are still closely involved with every level of the ISOF, from planning and carrying out missions to deciding tactics and  creating policy. According to Brig. Gen. Simeon Trombitas, commander of the Iraq National Counter-Terror Force Transition  Team, part of the multinational command responsible for turning control of the ISOF over to the Iraqi government, the US  Special Forces continue to “have advisers at every level of the chain of command.”

In January 2008 the US Special Forces started allowing ISOF commanders to join missions with them and the ISOF rank and file.  Starting last summer–when Hassan’s family was attacked–ISOF battalions began launching missions on their own, without  American advisers, in Sadr City, where political agreements forbid the Americans from entering. Accusations of human rights  abuses, killings and politically motivated arrests have surfaced, including assaults on a university president and arrests of  opposition politicians.

The US government has been focused on turning out “as many men in arms as possible, as quickly as possible,” says Peter  Harling, senior Middle East analyst at the International Crisis Group. “There has been very little impetus to build checks  and controls to prevent abuse. It’s been very much about building up capability without the oversight that could prevent some  of the units [from] turning into proxies working for some politician.”

In Sadr City opposition to the Iraqi government and the US occupation is strong. There is no longer any visible militia  presence, but pictures of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr still stick to the US-built concrete walls that enclose the  city, and calls to prayer end with a demand for the hastened exit of “the enemy.” There, the ISOF uses a policy of collective  punishment, aimed at intimidating civilians, charges Hassan al-Rubaie, Sadrist member of the parliamentary Security and  Defense Committee. “They terrorize entire neighborhoods just to arrest one person they think is a terrorist,” he says. “This  needs to stop.”

US Special Forces advisers have done little to respond to allegations of abuse. Civilian pleas, public protests, complaints  by Iraqi Army commanders about the ISOF’s actions and calls for disbanding it by members of Parliament have not pushed the US  government to take a hard look at the force they are creating. Instead, US advisers dismiss such claims as politically  motivated. “The enemy is trying to discredit them,” says Carstens. “It’s not because they are doing anything dirty.”

On the same night Hassan Mahsan’s house was raided, 26-year-old Haidar al-Aibi was killed with a bullet to the forehead. His  family says there was no warning. They tell me how it happened as we drink tea on the floor of their living room, furnished  only with thick foam cushions and mournful depictions of the Shiite martyr Hussein. A woman weeps loudly in the corner, the  sleeping child of her dead son almost obscured by the folds of her black garments.

Fathil al-Aibi says the family was awakened around midnight by a nearby explosion. His brother Haidar ran up to the roof to  see what had happened and was immediately shot from a nearby rooftop. When Fathil, his brother Hussein and his father, Abbas,  tried to bring Haidar downstairs, they were shot at, too. For about two hours he lay lifeless on the roof while his family  panicked as red laser beams from rifle scopes danced on their windows. “We had tests the next day at the university,” Hussein  says. “We didn’t think he would go like this.”

Down the road, around the same time that night, police commando Ahmed Shibli says he was also being fired on. He illuminates  two bullet holes in his house with a kerosene lamp as we talk. The men who busted open his front door called themselves the  dirty brigade, he says, and they were carrying American weapons, not the AK-47s or PKCs the National Police use. When they  entered, they fired immediately. “It wasn’t a warning shot. They shot at me like they wanted to kill me as I was getting down  on the ground. It was like we were first-degree terrorists.” They fired again, he says, fatally shooting his ailing 63-year- old father. As blood poured from the old man’s hip, Ahmed says the men held a gun to his little boy’s head and forced his  wife to search the room for the police-issued weapon he had left at work.

Ahmed and his brother were hauled to the outskirts of the city, along with Hassan, where they were lined up with other men in  the dark. Hassan insists on substantiating his story by showing me an official complaint issued by a local army commander  named Mustafa Sabah Yunis, alleging that an “unknown armed squadron” entered the area and arrested him.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi Army was rushing in to respond to the gunfire, and according to Hussein al-Aibi, these soldiers were  shot at as well. He tells me the army got Haidar off the roof and drove him to the hospital. On the way, Fathil says, the  vehicle was stopped by a dirty brigade operative, who asked Iraqi Army Major Abu Rajdi where they were going. According to  Fathil, Rajdi told the operative, “This is a college student who has nothing to do with anything, and you shot him  recklessly.” The operative responded by hitting Rajdi and saying, “Turn around and go back, or we’ll shoot him and we’ll  shoot you too.”

At Haidar’s funeral, Fathil asked Rajdi to testify. “You are a representative of the government, and you saw it all happen,”  he told the major. “You saw that he didn’t have a weapon in his hand.” Fathil says the major declined. “This is the dirty  brigade,” he recalls Rajdi saying. “We are afraid of them. When we see them, we retreat. If I testify against them, I’ll be  killed the next day. They kill and no one will hold them accountable, because they belong to the Americans.”

Major Rajdi’s fear and distrust of the ISOF are echoed by other members of the regular Iraqi Army. “Sometimes we are  surprised when the Special Forces enter,” says Lt. Colonel Yahya Rasoul Abdullah, commander of the Third Battalion of the  Forty-second Brigade in Sadr City. “Bad things happen. Some people steal, and some abuse women. They don’t know the people on  the streets like us. They just go after their target. We have suffered from this problem.”

Accounts of older ISOF operations I heard around Baghdad suggest that the Americans may have knowingly allowed violence  against civilians. In Adhamiya, long the stronghold of the Sunni insurgency in Baghdad, two hospital employees described  their 2006 run-in with the ISOF to me. According to both witnesses, a self-identified ISOF operative named “Captain Hussam”  unloaded his machine gun in the Al Numan Hospital after seeing the body of his superior, who had died under the hospital’s  care. An American operative with a red beard stood by silently watching. According to one witness, the Iraqi operative  demanded his commander’s death certificate, threatening to “torture you, kill you and kill the people of Adhamiya” if they  didn’t comply. The witnesses said the eight operatives who entered the hospital were driving Humvees, vehicles that only the  Americans and the ISOF use. The next day, Captain Hussam returned, a witness said, offering a box of bullets as an apology.

The effective head of the American ISOF project is General Trombitas of the Iraq National Counter-Terror Transition Team. A  towering man with a gray mustache and a wrinkled brow, Trombitas spent nearly seven of his over thirty years in the military  training special forces in Colombia, El Salvador and other countries. On February 23 he gave me a tour of Area IV, a joint  American-Iraqi base near the Baghdad International Airport, where US Special Forces train the ISOF. As we walk away from the  helicopter, he cracks a boyish smile. Though he’s worked with special forces all over the world, he tells me the men we are  about to meet are “the best.”

Trombitas says he is “very proud of what was done in El Salvador” but avoids the fact that special forces trained there by  the United States in the early 1980s were responsible for the formation of death squads that killed more than 50,000  civilians thought to be sympathetic with leftist guerrillas. Guatemala was a similar case. Some Guatemalan special forces  that had been trained in anti-terrorism tactics by the United States during the mid-1960s subsequently became death squads  that took part in the killing of around 140,000 people. In the early 1990s, US Special Forces trained and worked closely with  an elite Colombian police unit strongly suspected of carrying out some of the murders attributed to Los Pepes, a death squad  that became the backbone of the country’s current paramilitary organization. (Trombitas served in El Salvador from 1989-90  and in Colombia from 2003-2005, after these incidents took place.)

“The standards get looser when the Americans aren’t with [the local special forces], and they can eventually become death  squads, which I believe actually happened in Colombia,” says Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo, a book  about the hunt for Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar by CIA and US Special Forces. The tactics taught in each country are the  same, Bowden says. “They teach the same kind of skills. They use the same equipment.”

Trombitas told the official blog of the Defense Department that the training missions used in Latin America are “extremely  transferable” to Iraq. Salvadoran Special Forces even helped train the ISOF, he tells me. “It’s a world of coalitions,” he  says. “The longer we work together, the more alike we are. When we share our values and our experiences with other armies, we  make them the same.”

Trombitas guides me into a warehouse where ISOF operatives, most of them in black masks, have been preparing for our arrival.  He walks me through a special display of their American equipment–machine guns, sniper rifles, state-of-the-art night-vision  equipment and fluffy desert camo that makes soldiers look like teddy bears. He takes me up a catwalk overlooking a fake house  stocked with cartoonish posters of big-breasted women pointing pistols, a couple of real men dressed as “terrorists” with  kaffiyehs wrapped around their faces and a 10-year-old boy playing hostage.

As we stand in the observation area, the door explodes. After a minute of constant shooting, the operatives march out with  the “terrorists,” the boy and a poster of an ’80s-style villain, wearing a jean jacket and holding a woman hostage. More than  twenty bullet holes are centered on his forehead. “Look at that marksmanship,” Trombitas says, smiling proudly.

Trombitas gets to the issue of human rights before I do. He assures me that US Special Forces take allegations of human  rights abuses very seriously–two Iraqi men were let go for prisoner abuse since he took over in August last year, he says– but he won’t comment on specific cases. I raise the issue of accountability and bring up one well-documented mission that  caused waves in the Iraqi Parliament: in August the ISOF raided Diyala’s provincial government compound, reportedly with the  support of US Apache helicopters. They arrested a member of the Iraqi Islamic Party, Iraq’s main Sunni Arab party. They also  arrested the president of the university, also a Sunni, and killed a secretary and wounded four armed guards during the  night.

I barely get the word “Diyala” out of my mouth before the American operatives standing around us start to grumble nervously  and a translator jumps in. “For the reputation of the ISOF, please, let’s cut that off,” he says.

Abdul-Karim al-Samarrai, a member of the ruling United Iraqi Alliance and the parliamentary Security and Defense Committee,  says that what happened in Diyala was one of many signs of the prime minister’s bad intentions for the ISOF. “Politicians are  afraid because this force can be used for political ends,” he says. In response to outrage from members of Parliament over  the arrest of politicians by the ISOF, Maliki, who is officially required to approve every ISOF target, denied any knowledge  of the Diyala mission. His claim of innocence raises important questions. If the man who is supposed to be in charge of the  ISOF has no knowledge of its missions, then who is ultimately responsible for the force? Was Maliki lying to cover up the  fact that he is using the force for political purposes? Or was someone else–namely the Americans–calling the shots?

Diyala was only the first publicized case of possibly politically motivated arrests. In December the ISOF arrested as many as  thirty-five officials in the Interior Ministry who were thought to be in opposition to Maliki’s Islamic Dawa Party. This past  March the ISOF arrested at least one leader of the Awakening Councils, semiofficial Sunni neighborhood militias that have  been increasingly at odds with Maliki over his failure to keep a promise to incorporate the councils into the military or  give them other employment.

The Maliki government has developed a “culture of direct control,” says Michael Knights, a Lafer Fellow at the Washington  Institute and the head of its Iraq program. Knights visits Iraq regularly and has close contact with the country’s security  services. He says the people in charge of the ISOF at the regional levels are “personally chosen loyalists or relatives of  Maliki. It reminds me of Saddam.” Knights says that Maliki is only supposed to approve or reject missions that come to him,  but occasionally he will “assert his prerogative as the commander in chief and tell the ISOF to do something or not to do  something.” Knights raises the possibility that the ISOF will become Maliki’s personal death squad. “The prime minister is  looking for re-election, and there are not that many restraints on his ability to target political opponents, as [his  government] has been doing with the Sadrists for years now.”

Samarrai, along with other members of Parliament, is calling for disbanding the Counter-Terrorism Bureau. He says there is no  legal basis for an armed brigade to exist outside the control of the Interior or Defense ministry. “People are afraid of the  existence of an organization with such dreadful capabilities that reports directly to the prime minister,” he says.

Member of Parliament Hassan al-Rubaie is concerned about the close relationship between the ISOF and the Americans. “If the  US leaves Iraq, this will be the last force they will leave behind,” he insists. He is worried that such a powerful and  secretive force that is closely tied to the Americans could turn Iraq into a “military base in the region” by allowing the  United States to continue to conduct missions in Iraq with the cover of the ISOF. “They have become a replacement” for the  Americans, he says.

President Obama has said he plans to increase reliance on the US Special Forces; Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s recent  appointment of Stanley McChrystal as commander of Afghanistan suggests that he is keeping his word. From 2003 to 2008,  McChrystal was the head of the Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees the Army’s most secretive forces and is  responsible for the training of special forces abroad. McChrystal was also commander of US Special Operations Forces in Iraq  for five years, during which time, according to the Wall Street Journal, he commanded “units that specialize in guerrilla  warfare, including the training of indigenous armies.”

“The eventual drawdown in Iraq is not the end of the mission for our elite forces,” Gates said in May 2008. Gates hasn’t  spoken on the issue since Obama took office; but Obama says he will institutionalize irregular warfare capabilities, and the  White House stresses the need to “create a more robust capacity to train, equip and advise foreign security forces, so that  local allies are better prepared to confront mutual threats.”

Bowden says those “local allies” are often used for covert operations. “The United States Special Operations Command  cultivates relationships with special forces in other countries because it gives the United States the opportunity of  intervening militarily in a covert way,” he says. “The ideal covert op is one that is actually carried out by local forces.”

As I stand on the tarmac with Trombitas in Area IV, waiting for our helicopter to return and fly us back to the Green Zone, I  ask him how long the United States will be involved with the ISOF. “Special forces are special because we do maintain a  relationship with foreign forces,” he says. “Part of our theater-engagement strategy is to maintain a relationship with those  units that are important to the security of the region and to the world.” As our helicopter appears in the lightly clouded  sky, he chooses his next words carefully: “We are going to have a working relationship for a while,” he says.

The Nation

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In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”…

There can be little doubt now that President Bush’s reason for launching the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally religious. He was driven by his belief that the attack on Saddam’s Iraq was the fulfilment of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to serve as the instrument of the Lord.

And British Prime Minister Tony Blair long-time mentor, advisor and confidante said:

“Tony’s Christian faith is part of him, down to his cotton socks. He believed strongly at the time, that intervention in Kosovo, Sierra Leone – Iraq too – was all part of the Christian battle; good should triumph over evil, making lives better.”

Mr Burton, who was often described as Mr Blair’s mentor, says that his religion gave him a “total belief in what’s right and what’s wrong”, leading him to see the so-called War on Terror as “a moral cause”…

Anti-war campaigners criticised remarks Mr Blair made in 2006, suggesting that the decision to go to war in Iraq would ultimately be judged by God.

Given that the Iraq war really was a crusade, the fact that the Pentagon is now saying that it may have to leave troops in Iraq for another decade shows that the crusade is still ongoing under Obama.

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And So It Goes …

In Kut, southeast of Baghdad, a girl cries after her mother was killed in a US military raid. (Photo: AP)Last week found Iraq swimming in blood once again. Attacks last Thursday brought the worst violence Iraq has seen in over a year, with at least 96 Iraqis killed and 157 wounded in two massive suicide bombings. Over 35 bombings have rocked Baghdad this month alone. There appears to be no end in sight for the escalating violence. For an Obama administration that plans to keep at least 50,000 US troops in Iraq indefinitely, look no further for a justification in doing so.

On Friday, further slaughter assaulted Iraq, with 93 killed and another 163 wounded as the attacks continued unabated. Saturday was a light day, with “only” 15 Iraqis killed and 22 wounded, while Iraqi security forces reportedly defused 20 bombs and two booby-trapped cars in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, violence most likely related to the growing battle between government forces and the Sahwa, who are stepping up attacks against government and US forces, continues. In the last three days, clashes erupted at a police checkpoint in Fallujah, three men were killed while planting an improvised explosive device (IED) in Khanaqin, three Sahwa fighters were arrested north of Babel while planting an IED, an IED targeting Sahwa members in Udhaim killed three members and wounded three others, gunmen killed a member of the Sahwa in Mussayab, a car bomb was defused in Fallujah and two Sahwa members were wounded in a blast in Iskandariya. And, by the way, at least five US soldiers have been killed in the last five days.

Sunday found another 12 Iraqis killed and five wounded. A US military raid of a home in Kut brought the deaths of a man and his sister-in-law, who just happened to be the wife of a local clan leader; additionally, four Iraqis, one of them, a police officer, were arrested. Protests erupted as angry Iraqis denounced the raid. During a funeral procession in Kut where the cloth-draped coffins of the dead were carried, protesters called the Americans “criminal occupiers” and demanded the release of the seized men. “We condemn this horrific incident,” said Latif al-Tarfa, governor of Wasit province, “It violates the agreements between US forces and the Iraqi government. Innocent people were killed and the city is now very tense. They were poor people. They do not cause any political or security problems.”

US forces denied killing the man and claimed the death of the woman was “accidental.” They also claimed they had full permission from Iraqi authorities. Contradicting this US military propaganda, Maliki viewed the US military raid as a crime that violated a bilateral security pact, and wants US forces to hand those responsible to the courts, an Iraqi official in the office of Maj. Gen. Qassim Moussawi, the Baghdad security spokesman, told reporters. “The general commander (Maliki) is affirming that the killing of two citizens and detaining others in Kut is considered a violation of the security pact. He asks the commander of the multinational forces to release the detainees and hand over those responsible for this crime to the courts.”

Make no mistake about it – there is a war on. The floodgates of hell have once again been opened, largely as the result of US unwillingness to pressure the Maliki government to back off its ongoing attacks against the US-created Sahwa, which have led to the Sahwa walking off their security posts in many areas, which has been a green light for al-Qaeda to resume its operations in Iraq. In addition, many of the Sahwa forces, weary of not being paid promised wages from the government, as well as broken promises by the occupiers of their country, have resumed attacks against US forces. Again, there doesn’t appear to be anything in the short term to indicate these trends will stop.

General Patraeus, as part of his ongoing efforts to take responsibility for the hell he helped create in Iraq, laughably blamed the recent attacks in Baghdad on “Tunisians.”

Conveniently, during her recent visit to Baghdad, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while perched in the surreal Green Zone which is floating atop a sea of Iraqi blood, had the gall to claim “that Iraq is going in the right direction” and that the recent violence does “not reflect any diversion from the security progress that has been made” in Iraq. The primary reason for her unannounced visit was to reassure Prime Minister Maliki that if the violence continues to worsen, the Obama administration would back off its so-called withdrawal plan. Let us not forget the context of this visit – in addition to the hellish week Iraq has just experienced, overall violence there has been on the rise for the last two months.

Along with leaving up to 50,000 US troops in Iraq indefinitely, the plan to remove many of the other troops by August 2010 is slipping into the background as the justifications for remaining in Iraq are now being placed in the foreground. Iraq is Obama’s occupation now, and circumstances there are ripping away the mask of any promised “change.”

»

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5 hours after the 9/11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld said “my interest is to hit Saddam”.

He also said “Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

And at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions between top administration officials, several lines below the statement “judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at same time”, is the statement “Hard to get a good case.” In other words, top officials knew that there wasn’t a good case that Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.

And yet, the government knew that Al Qaeda and Iraq were not linked. For example, “Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the [9/11] attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda”.

And a Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary issued in February 2002 by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency cast significant doubt on the possibility of a Saddam Hussein-al-Qaeda conspiracy.

And yet Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials claimed and continue to claim that Saddam was behind 9/11. See this analysis. Indeed, Bush administration officials apparently swore in a lawsuit that Saddam was behind 9/11.

Indeed, President Bush’s March 18, 2003 letter to Congress authorizing the use of force against Iraq, includes the following paragraph:

(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Therefore, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war to Congress by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks. See this.

Tortured Logic

Yesterday, Seator Levin revealed that the U.S. used torture techniques aimed at extracting false confessions.

Today, McClatchy fills in some of the details:

Former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration…

For most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document…

When people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.”Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam . . .

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

“I think it’s obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq),” [Senator] Levin said in a conference call with reporters. “They made out links where they didn’t exist.”

Levin recalled Cheney’s assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.

In other words, top Bush administration officials not only knowingly lied about a non-existent connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, but they pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create such a false linkage.

What Does That Say About the Persuasiveness of the 9/11 Commission Report?

As noted by Newsweek:

The commission appears to have ignored obvious clues throughout 2003 and 2004 that its account of the 9/11 plot and Al Qaeda’s history relied heavily on information obtained from detainees who had been subjected to torture, or something not far from it.

The panel raised no public protest over the CIA’s interrogation methods, even though news reports at the time suggested how brutal those methods were. In fact, the commission demanded that the CIA carry out new rounds of interrogations in 2004 to get answers to its questions.

That has troubling implications for the credibility of the commission’s final report. In intelligence circles, testimony obtained through torture is typically discredited; research shows that people will say anything under threat of intense physical pain.

And yet it is a distinct possibility that Al Qaeda suspects who were the exclusive source of information for long passages of the commission’s report may have been subjected to “enhanced” interrogation techniques, or at least threatened with them, because of the 9/11 Commission….

Information from CIA interrogations of two of the three—KSM and Abu Zubaydah—is cited throughout two key chapters of the panel’s report focusing on the planning and execution of the attacks and on the history of Al Qaeda.

Footnotes in the panel’s report indicate when information was obtained from detainees interrogated by the CIA. An analysis by NBC News found that more than a quarter of the report’s footnotes—441 of some 1,700—referred to detainees who were subjected to the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation program, including the trio who were waterboarded.

Commission members note that they repeatedly pressed the Bush White House and CIA for direct access to the detainees, but the administration refused. So the commission forwarded questions to the CIA, whose interrogators posed them on the panel’s behalf.

The commission’s report gave no hint that harsh interrogation methods were used in gathering information, stating that the panel had “no control” over how the CIA did its job; the authors also said they had attempted to corroborate the information “with documents and statements of others.”

But how could the commission corroborate information known only to a handful of people in a shadowy terrorist network, most of whom were either dead or still at large?

Former senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a Democrat on the commission, told me last year he had long feared that the investigation depended too heavily on the accounts of Al Qaeda detainees who were physically coerced into talking. …

Kerrey said it might take “a permanent 9/11 commission” to end the remaining mysteries of September 11. Those now calling for more 9/11-style panels would be wise to heed his words.

Indeed, as I have repeatedly noted, the 9/11 Commission Report was largely based on a third-hand account of what tortured detainees said, with two of the three parties in the communication being government employees.

The 9/11 Commission itself is complaining that the government lied to – and hid evidence from – the Commission. See this, this and this.

Now that we know that the interrogators used torture techniques aimed at extracting false confessions, does the 9/11 Commission Report carry any weight whatsoever?

Source: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/04/5-hours-after-911-attacks-rumsfeld-said.html

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Until recently, Google Earth prominently displayed an image of a clandestine US airbase that housed unmanned Predator drones in Pakistan. An image appeared to show three drones outside a hangar at the end of a runway, which was then confirmed to be an airfield by a British newspaper.

The newspaper then cited intelligence sources as saying the CIA had been using the base to attack and observe al-Qaeda and Taliban militants along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

The photograph appears to confirm a seeming slip-of-the-tongue by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who said that the US was launching strikes on Pakistani territory from inside Pakistan (”As I understand it, these [drones] are flown out of a Pakistani base,” she said). Feinstein’s spokesman later asserted she was only repeating something she saw in The Washington Post, but intelligence sources used the opportunity to confirm that the US had indeed been using Pakistani bases.

American and Pakistani officials have repeatedly denied that the US has launched strikes from within Pakistan.

“The Google Earth image now suggests that the US began launching Predators from [the Shamsi airbase] — built by Arab sheiks for falconry trips — at least three years ago,” the Times of London’s Jeremy Page reported. “The advantage of Shamsi is that it provides a discreet launchpad within minutes of Quetta — a known Taleban staging post — as well as Taliban infiltration routes into Afghanistan and potential militant targets farther afield.”

“Google Earth’s current image of Shamsi — about 100 miles south of the Afghan border and 100 miles east of the Iranian one — undoubtedly shows the same airstrip as the image from 2006,” Page added. “There are no visible drones, but it does show that several new buildings and other structures have been erected since 2006, including what appears to be a hangar large enough to fit three drones. Perimeter defenses — apparently made from the same blast-proof barriers used at US and NATO bases in Afghanistan — have also been set up around the hangar.”

A military spokesman at the US Embassy in Islamabad and Pakistan’s chief military spokesman declined or was unavailable to comment on the revelations.

Google compliant with censorship requests: report

Despite the latest Google expose, the California-based company has becoming increasingly compliant to government requests to block purportedly sensitive information — including images of Tibet, military installations and even a General Electric research plant — according to a report prepared by the Open Source Center for the Bush Administration’s Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and reports circulated online about areas Google has blocked or blurred.

The research report was not approved for public release but was leaked to Secrecy News. It is prepared entirely on public information — so called “open source” intelligence. But it paints a picture of an increasingly pliant global communications juggernaut, willing to do business with authoritarian regimes and US government agencies at the expense of transparency.

China, for instance, has an “online geographical information security management and coordination group” which regularly browses online mapping sites.

“When problems are discovered, they are either raised with Google’s China headquarters or through diplomatic channels,” the report says.

“Google has been very cooperative in the course of communications,” a Chinese spokesman remarked.

Among the areas Google blurs out in China includes, not surprisingly, Tibet/Xinjiang Province. Other areas of Asia that have been clouded include northern areas of Pakistan — it’s unknown why or who might have requested the omission.

Google also censors certain sites in India. India may also be taking measures to hide their facilities from satellites. According to the report, “India’s army announced that it had taken evasive measures against the ‘intrusive photographs of strategic installations.’”

Google sometimes uses older images to replace existing ones to erase, say, the movement of troops in Iraq. After a January 2007 report that terrorists were attacking British bases based on Google Earth imagery, Google replaced images of these sites with photographs taken before the war. The report also claims that al Qaeda militants used Google Earth to target oil facilities in Yemen.

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We have a better grasp of the human costs of the war. For example, the United Nations estimates that there are about 4.5 million displaced Iraqis — more than half of them refugees — or about one in every six citizens. Only 5 percent have chosen to return to their homes over the past year, a period of reduced violence from the high levels of 2005-07. The availability of healthcare, clean water, functioning schools, jobs and so forth remains elusive. According to Unicef, many provinces report that less than 40 percent of households have access to clean water. More than 40 percent of children in Basra, and more than 70 percent in Baghdad, cannot attend school.

The mortality caused by the war is also high. Several household surveys were conducted between 2004 and 2007. While there are differences among them, the range suggests a congruence of estimates. But none have been conducted for eighteen months, and the two most reliable surveys were completed in mid-2006. The higher of those found 650,000 “excess deaths” (mortality attributable to war); the other yielded 400,000. The war remained ferocious for twelve to fifteen months after those surveys were finished and then began to subside. Iraq Body Count, a London NGO that uses English-language press reports from Iraq to count civilian deaths, provides a means to update the 2006 estimates. While it is known to be an undercount, because press reports are incomplete and Baghdad-centric, IBC nonetheless provides useful trends, which are striking. Its estimates are nearing 100,000, more than double its June 2006 figure of 45,000. (It does not count nonviolent excess deaths — from health emergencies, for example — or insurgent deaths.) If this is an acceptable marker, a plausible estimate of total deaths can be calculated by doubling the totals of the 2006 household surveys, which used a much more reliable and sophisticated method for estimates that draws on long experience in epidemiology. So we have, at present, between 800,000 and 1.3 million “excess deaths” as we approach the six-year anniversary of this war.

This gruesome figure makes sense when reading of claims by Iraqi officials that there are 1-2 million war widows and 5 million orphans. This constitutes direct empirical evidence of total excess mortality and indirect, though confirming, evidence of the displaced and the bereaved and of general insecurity. The overall figures are stunning: 4.5 million displaced, 1-2 million widows, 5 million orphans, about 1 million dead — in one way or another, affecting nearly one in two Iraqis.

By any sensible measure, it would be difficult to describe this as a victory of any kind. It speaks volumes about the repair work we must do for Iraqis, and it should caution us against the savage wars we are prone to. Now that Bush is gone, perhaps the United States can honestly face the damage we have wrought and the responsibilities we must accept from it.

John Tirman is Executive Director of MIT’s Center for International Studies.

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The aforementioned meant that, from that point onwards, outside powers became the most important players in Middle Eastern geopolitics. That was not necessarily a new reality because both the Romans and the Mongols had invaded a considerable portion of the Middle East.

Indeed, after World War One, France and Britain forged the secret Sykes-Picot agreement in order to establish mutually recognized influence zones there. The region became more strategically important when it was discovered that the Middle East possessed the world’s largest oil reserves.

For both Paris and London, an outcome of World War Two was the loss of their colonial possessions in the Middle East. Thus, this area of the planet, located in Eurasia’s rimland, became one of the main battlefields during the Cold War rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States.

Right after World War Two, both the Americans and the Soviets supported the creation of Israel hoping they could gain the new State’s geopolitical loyalty. In the early years of the Cold War, US (and British) intelligence instigated a coup d’état to overthrow Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosadegh, who had previously masterminded the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, an ancestor of today’s British Petroleum. As a result of that intrigue, the Shah of Iran took over the country’s government.

Washington also forged an understanding with Saudi Arabia’s ruling elite: The House of Saud. Riyadh thus agreed to ensure that oil supplies for the West would be uninterrupted in exchange for American military and diplomatic protection.

The Soviet Union also became heavily involved in regional affairs. Moscow welcomed the arrival of a friendly regime in what was known as the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. The Soviets obtained access to naval facilities there. The Kremlin was also the main backer of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Back then, Egypt was a recipient of Soviet financial, military, technical and political aid. Nasser established a close relation with Syria and promoted the creation of an Arab United Republic, which would be willing to challenge both Western and Israeli interests. However, Nasser’s plans were shattered when American-backed Israel infringed a crushing defeat on Cairo. Egypt would eventually be disengaged from the Soviet orbit and embed into the Pro-American camp.

Furthermore, Western and Israeli intelligence apparatuses covertly encouraged Radical Islamic movements, bearing in mind the geopolitical objective to tackle secular Pan-Arab governments and political forces. Some groups like Hamas, al-Qaeda, the Taliban or even the Muslim Brotherhood flourished as a result of the American (and also Western and Israeli) needs to counter organizations which were or that could be prone to align with the Kremlin. Geopolitics makes strange bedfellows indeed.

The Iranian revolution was a huge geopolitical earthquake whose shockwaves heavily reverberated in both Washington and Moscow. The fall of the Shah and the empowerment of the Ayatollahs was a major cause of concern. The US feared that some of its allies (think of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and so on) could be the targets of similar uprising due to their populations’ discontent for lack of economic progress and governmental corruption among other reasons. That scenario was utterly threatening for the West because it could potentially endanger their oil supplies.

The Kremlin regarded this situation as extremely dire because a growing contagion of Islamic-inspired unrest, if not dealt with, might have very well reached deep into the Soviet Union’s Central Asian Republics, all of them inhabited by populations predominantly Muslim. There was another concern for Moscow. The triumph of radical Islamic forces in Iran could enhance the Muhadijin’s determination to fight the Soviet-friendly government of Afghanistan. The Americans supported those ‘Holy Warriors’, hoping it could lure Moscow into a war of attrition there.

In short, both the US and the USRR saw the Iranian revolution as a problem that needed to be taken care of. They knew (and their successors still do) that, historically Persia has been a large Empire which was feared by the Greeks, the Romans and the Ottomans and that Teheran’s rulers (weather its government was Zoroastrian, Secular, Royal, or Shiite) had envisioned and embraced the idea of a ‘Greater Iran’. Such unfulfilled agenda, coupled with a high dose of Islamic fundamentalism, could spell a recipe for disaster if unattended.

History does not lack a certain dose of irony. Both the Americans and the Soviets supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a counterweight against Iran. Nevertheless, the US was not willing to afford an Iraqi victory over the Ayatollahs in the Iraq-Iran war. The balance of power had to be preserved while at the same time containing the Iranians. So America (with some Israeli help) decided to sell weapons to Iran and then invest those profits in funding anti-Soviet covert operations all over the world. Israel’s main motivation was to prevent Iraq from becoming a regional power. That is what the Israeli attack launched on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear testing was all about.

The American invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq generated an interesting byproduct. Two of the most antagonistic regimes toward Iran had been militarily crushed. The Iranians saw this as an opportunity to enhance their power and extend their influence throughout the Middle East and even beyond. The Persians have resorted to its Sunni as well as Shiite militant proxies (Hamas and Hezbollah) to challenge Israel, a hostile power not too far from Iranian soil. Teheran has also forged closer links with mostly-Sunni Syria. Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s victory also meant that Teheran began seeking a convenient relation with Beijing and Moscow.

China has become an important buyer of Iranian petroleum. Both the Chinese and the Iranians have seriously considered the possibility to build an oil pipeline running from Iran to China. There has also been some talks regarding an eventual Chinese military base in Iranian soil. Meanwhile, Russia has become Iran’s largest provider of weapons and it is the Russians who are collaborating in building the Busher nuclear plant. It is quite telling that Iran’s government has requested full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and has manifested an interest to join the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization. All of the above does not necessarily mean that Beijing and Moscow regard Iran as full-fledged ally. It can be suggested that they use it as a tool of leverage to extract important concessions from the West should the need arise.

Nonetheless, this cooperation has not gone unnoticed in Washington. An American military simulation called Vigilant Shield took place in 2006. Its assumptions were that if the US went to war with ‘Irmingham‘ (a thinly guised version of Iran), it was possible that ‘Churia‘ (which stands for China) and Ruebek (read Russia) might become somehow involved.

Although Iran is targeted by American neocons for belonging to the so called ‘Axis of Evil’, Ahmadinejad’s government has been pragmatic enough to engage the Americans in covert negotiations about Iraq becoming some sort of buffer state which does not become a client state of neither America nor Iran. Perhaps that is one of the reasons the US has delayed a strike on Iran even though Washington refuses to dismiss its military threat.

Israel’s operation Cast Lead, as Professor Michel Chossudovsky demonstrates in his analysis entitled “War and Natural Gas”, was in part motivated by Israel’s desire to control gas reserves. It is conceivable that a political factor plays an important role as well. Israeli current government, headed by the Kadima-Labor Axis Ehud Olmert-Tzipi Livni-Ehud Barak can be defeated in the upcoming elections by Likud’s Benyamin Netanyahu so perhaps they are trying to demonstrate to Israeli voters that they are not hesitant about using hard power. There is not a huge difference between both factions, but it cannot be denied that Netanyahu is far more hawkish than the Olmert-Livni-Barak trio. If Netanyahu becomes the next Prime Minister, the likelihood of war will increase.

As the Prussian strategist Carl Von Clausewitz warned: “War is a gamble” and Operation Cast Lead might bring about some serious consequences indeed. Whether its outcomes are unintended or deliberate is yet to be seen.

For instance, Israel’s military incursion in Gaza has already enraged the Arab Masses all over the Middle East. Some Pro-Western governments in the region are in a rather dire situation (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia) and their position can become ever more fragile for they can become the target of their own populations discontent because of their rulers’ (covert or otherwise) collaboration with the Americans and/or the Israelis.

Those Arab governments are afraid of Iran’s using its proxies and allies to fuel unrest and to topple them, thus advancing Teheran’s agenda of becoming a regional leader. If those governments are overthrown, their hypothetical successors will surely be much less willing to collaborate with the West, which knows that, if such thing ever happens, the Middle Eastern balance of power would dramatically change, not to mention that the price of oil would skyrocket.

Israel fears a nuclear Iran would mean the end of the Israeli monopoly over nuclear weapons in the region. An Iran armed with nuclear weapons (even if it is ruled by hardline Mahmud Ahmadinejad) would not be foolish enough to attack Israel first because Teheran is well aware of Israel’s menacing stockpile of nuclear weapons.

So what the Israeli government really is scared of is the possibility that any rival of Israel, covered by a hypothetical Iranian nuclear umbrella, would feel less intimidated by Israel. Moreover, such scenario could encourage other Middle Easter States to develop their own nuclear weapons. So far, the Israelis have implemented a policy of dispensing carrots (negotiation proposals) and sticks (air strikes) to Damascus in an attempt to seduce Syria away from Iran.

On the other hand, the West is not afraid of a nuclear Iran per se. One can infer that from their refusal to do anything meaningful to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by States like India, Israel or Pakistan. Rather, the Americans and the Europeans cannot accept a ‘Pax Iranica’ in the Middle East because Teheran would, de facto, control a zone which contains the world’s largest oil reserves, a resource the Western economies have to import because their domestic supplies are not enough to meet their consumption needs.

In case of an Israeli and/or American attack against Iran, Ahmadinejad’s government will certainly respond. A possible countermeasure would be to fire Persian ballistic missiles against Israel and maybe even against American military bases in the regions. Teheran will unquestionably resort to its proxies like Hamas or Hezbollah (or even some of its Shiite allies it has in Lebanon or Saudi Arabia) to carry out attacks against Israel, America and their allies, effectively setting in flames a large portion of the Middle East. The ultimate weapon at Iranian disposal is to block the Strait of Hormuz. If such chokepoint is indeed asphyxiated, that would dramatically increase the price of oil, this a very threatening retaliation because it will bring intense financial and economic havoc upon the West, which is already facing significant trouble in those respects.

In short, the necessary conditions for a major war in the Middle East are given. Such conflict could rapidly spiral out of control and thus a relatively minor clash could quickly and dangerously escalate by engulfing the whole region and perhaps even beyond. There are many key players: the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Arabs, the Persians and their respective allies and some great powers could become involved in one way or another (America, Russia, Europe, China). Therefore, any miscalculation by any of the main protagonists can trigger something no one can stop. Taking into consideration that the stakes are too high, perhaps it is not wise to be playing with fire right in the middle of a powder keg.

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A new congressional report is belatedly confirming what many have long known: that the White House and in particular then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, lied to Congress in 2004 when he told them the Bush administration was not repeatedly warned by the CIA not to make the claim that Saddam had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger.

What is astonishing about this report, which documents that the CIA at least four times tried to prevent Bush and other top officials from presenting that lie to Congress and the American public in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, is not that it documents what has long been known, but that Congress and the corporate media are still pretending that the claim itself was an acceptable justification for launching a war.

Set aside for the moment the fact that the claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium ore (so-called yellowcake) from the desert nation of Niger was based upon forged documents which were almost certainly the work of Defense Department hacks in the Rumsfeld/Cheney-created Office of Special Plans (see my book The Case for Impeachment). Even if this fraudulent deal had been real, how on earth could it have been used as it was by President Bush and Vice President Cheney to justify an invasion of Iraq?

Consider that what was being asserted was that Iraq had attempted (not even succeeded!) to buy 400 tons of uranium ore. This claim was used by President Bush, in his Jan. 20, 2003 State of the Union address, to argue that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program. But in the case of a country that does not have a nuclear weapon, a program is years away, perhaps a decade or more away, from the reality of having a usable weapon.

As we have seen in the case of Iran, which has been refining uranium ore now for at least five years, the mere fact of possessing uranium ore, and even of having a quantity of gas centrifuges to refine out the minute quantities of the fissionable isotope U-235 are only the first and, technologically speaking, the easiest, steps towards actually constructing a bomb. (Experts say that after all this time, even if it is actually trying to build a nuclear bomb, which the Iranian government denies, the country remains years from that alleged goal.)

If Bush and Cheney had not been lying through their teeth, and Saddam had actually been buying yellowcake for the purpose of making a nuke weapon, he would still have had to obtain large numbers of centrifuges, would have had to power them up and run them for years, and would have then had to obtain the technology to build and test a bomb, none of which steps he was even alleged to have taken.

Yet Bush was claiming that there was an imminent threat to America posed by Saddam Hussein’s yellowcake purchase effort, and that an invasion had to be launched almost immediately. He used the term imminent because that is the legal requirement in the UN Charter, to which the US is a signatory and which is based upon the Nuremberg Charter established at the end of the Second World War. It states that no nation may invade another nation unless that nation poses an imminent threat to the would-be invader.

The yellowcake story, now definitively shown to have been a deliberate lie, even if true, could not have constituted such an imminent threat.

Yet not once has this key point been addressed by any member of Congress who voted to authorize an invasion. Nor does the point get mentioned in mainstream journalistic reports on the matter.

Average Americans, nearly half of whom reportedly believe that the earth was formed just 6000 years ago and a fair proportion of whom believe that the sun revolves around the earth, might be excused for not understanding this point, but clearly intelligent members of Congress like former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry and future secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who both claim they might not have voted for war “had they had known then what they know now,” are themselves caught in a lie.

They and other war backers clearly knew in 2002 and 2003 that the yellowcake story, even if true, was no justification for war. So did editors and reporters (like Judith Miller and Michael Gordon of the New York Times, for example).

I have yet to see a single US corporate media outlet explain that the yellowcake story was simply never a justification for war. It will probably never happen, and yet many analysts have said it was that claim by Bush, Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others (remember her dark warnings about not wanting a “smoking gun” to be a “mushroom cloud”?), more than any other that stampeded the nation into a war that has cost over $1 trillion over five years, and over 4000 US lives and one million innocent Iraqi lives.

Bush, Cheney, Rice, Gonzalez, Rumsfeld and others in the outgoing administration should all be impeached, tried and jailed for their lying and treason in embroiling the US in the pointless and criminal Iraq War, with the yellowcake story a key element in any indictments. But there needs to be some kind of reckoning too, for the willful ignorance and deceit on the part of the majority of Congress and of the press in pretending that an alleged scheme to buy uranium ore was a justification for launching a war of aggression, which five years on, is still continuing.

The American people themselves also need to reflect deeply, not just on how ill served we are by our elected officials and by our media, but on how gullible we have become, and how ignorant.
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DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2008 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

http://www.opednews.com/articles/White-House-Lied-About-Ira-by-Dave-Lindorff-081219-484.html

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BAGHDAD, Dec. 18 — The Iraqi journalist who hurled his shoes at President Bush is begging for a pardon for what he described as “an ugly act,” the prime minister’s spokesman said Thursday.

Muntadar al-Zaidi, a correspondent for an Iraqi-owned television station based in Cairo, could face imprisonment if convicted of insulting a foreign leader. He remained in custody Thursday night.

“It is too late to reverse the big and ugly act that I perpetrated,” Zaidi wrote in a letter delivered to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, according to the prime minister’s spokesman.

The spokesman, Yaseen Majeed, said Zaidi went on in the letter to recall an interview he conducted with the prime minister in 2005 when Maliki invited him into his home, saying, “Come in; it is your home, too.”

“So I ask for your pardon, excellency,” Majeed quoted the letter as saying.

But the journalist’s brother, Durgham al-Zaidi, said he was skeptical that his brother would write such a letter.

“I am suspicious . . . because I know my brother very well,” he said. He added that family members and staffers from the al-Baghdadia TV station would stage a sit-in Friday near the U.S.-controlled Green Zone.

White House press secretary Dana Perino said Thursday that she’d seen reports that Zaidi had apologized but that she did not know whether Bush was aware of them.

“The president harbors no hard feelings about it, and the Iraqis have a process that they’ll follow,” Perino said. “But he did urge them not to overreact, because he was not bothered by the incident, although it’s not appropriate for people to throw shoes at a press conference, at any leader.”

Muntadar al-Zaidi has been in custody since the Sunday night incident, which occurred during a news conference by Bush and Maliki. The case has riveted Iraq, with many Iraqis considering Zaidi a hero for defying the U.S. president, whom they accuse of destroying their country.

A shouting match Wednesday between parliament members for and against Zaidi prompted the speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, to announce he was resigning.

Mashhadani showed up at parliament Thursday to resume his speaker duties. But so many lawmakers boycotted in protest of his outburst that the session was canceled.

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