Free Iraq

RE:
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace,

"I'm not trainable today."

I burst into laughter when reading this, but then also began to think MAYBE there really are more in our military who think like him!

Well, we know there are more...but the question is are there enough of "them" to end this insane war?

I can only hope this statement reflects not only Gen. Pace's 'attitude' toward our certifiable loony (as one writer dubbed Rumsfeld recently) but also a growing group of CLEAR THINKING military leaders.

I keep waiting for them to 'stand down or stand up' and refuse to continue to carry out the orders they know are coming from the demented minds of The BushCo govt.
 

Imad

Well, rumsfeld CAN change his mind.

I wonder how long it will take before he comes up with the correct term (freedom fighters).

I'm not holding my breath till then.
 

Perhaps a questionable metric? . . .
Members of Congress Ask Bush to Stop Undercounting U.S. Casualties
 

A 'metric' Donald hasn't mentioned . . .
Malcom Lagauche, A THOUSAND NINE ELEVENS: "Since August 2, 1990, the U.S. has killed almost three million Iraqis."
 

Killing 'metrics' - and, Justice . . .
Chris Floyd, Sacred Terror: On Sept. 17, 2001, President George W. Bush signed an executive order authorizing the use of "lethal measures" against anyone in the world whom he or his minions designated an "enemy combatant." This order remains in force today. No judicial evidence, no hearing, no charges are required for these killings; no law, no border, no oversight restrains them. Bush has also given agents in the field carte blanche to designate "enemies" on their own initiative and kill them as they see fit.

[M]ost of the assassinations are carried out in secret, quietly, professionally, like a contract killing for the mob. ...

The dangers of this policy are obvious, as a UN report on "extrajudicial killings" noted in December 2004: "Empowering governments to identify and kill 'known terrorists' places no verifiable obligation upon them to demonstrate in any way that those against whom lethal force is used are indeed terrorists. ... While it is portrayed as a limited 'exception' to international norms, it actually creates the potential for an endless expansion of the relevant category to include any enemies of the State, social misfits, political opponents, or others."

It's hard to believe that any genuine democracy would accept a claim by its leader that he could have anyone killed simply by labeling them an "enemy." It's hard to believe that any adult with even the slightest knowledge of history or human nature could countenance such unlimited power, knowing the evil it is bound to produce.

Bush proudly held up this hideous system as an example of what he called "the meaning of American justice."
 

The cost of killing metrics - in Iraq
 

Metric coverup . . .
The Big Heist by "Iraq's Best Hope" - Blair Tries to Cover Up $1.3 Billion Iraqi Theft
 

Saddam's trial witnesses faulty, says lawyer: "They were reading. Who do you know who wrote what? You cannot tell whether it's something they saw or something they heard or read in a newspaper."

But there have also been many inconsistencies in the stories the witnesses have told, and the judge has repeatedly warned some of them not to ramble, and to clarify their thoughts. Several were barely teenagers when the events took place.

"This is one of the amazing things. ...How does a 10 or 12-year-old remember details and names, and sits there and recites 18 names after how many years now we are talking? Going back to 1982 or 1980?"

"That's ridiculous ... Somebody gave them those names."
 

Bush on the Constitution: 'It's just a goddamned piece of paper'
 

Dear George,
If the American Constitution is "just a goddamed piece of paper", shredded at will, I'm wondering about your thoughts on the brand new squeaky clean Iraqi Constitution, bought at a great price of many human metrics, both Iraqi & 'Coalition'. Headed for the shredder?
 

The American Constitution is "just a goddamed piece of paper"
 

Extract (but not much omitted!)
Wayne Madsen, Internet Censorship: The warning signs for the crackdown on the web have been with us for over a decade. The Clipper chip controversy of the 90s, John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) system pushed in the aftermath of 9-11, backroom deals between the Federal government and the Internet service industry, and the Patriot Act have ushered in a new era of Internet censorship, something just half a decade ago computer programmers averred was impossible given the nature of the web. They were wrong, dead wrong.

Take for example of what recently occurred when two journalists were taking on the phone about a story that appeared on Google News. The story was about a Christian fundamentalist move in Congress to use U.S. military force in Sudan to end genocide in Darfur. The story appeared on the English Google News site in Qatar. But the very same Google News site when accessed simultaneously in Washington, DC failed to show the article. This censorship is accomplished by geolocation filtering: the restriction or modifying of web content based on the geographical region of the user. In addition to countries, such filtering can now be implemented for states, cities, and even individual IP addresses.

With reports in the Swedish newspaper Svensa Dagbladet today that the United States has transmitted a Homeland Security Department "no fly" list of 80,000 suspected terrorists to airport authorities around the world, it is not unreasonable that a "no [or restricted] surfing/emailing" list has been transmitted to Internet Service Providers around the world. The systematic disruptions of web sites and email strongly suggests that such a list exists.

News reports on CIA prisoner flights and secret prisons are disappearing from Google and other search engines like Alltheweb as fast as they appear. Here now, gone tomorrow is the name of the game.

Google is systematically failing to list and link to articles that contain explosive information about the Bush administration, the war in Iraq, Al Qaeda, and U.S. political scandals. But Google is not alone in working closely to stifle Internet discourse. America On Line, Microsoft, Yahoo and others are slowly turning the Internet into an information superhighway dominated by barricades, toll booths, off-ramps that lead to dead ends, choke points, and security checks.

America On Line is the most egregious is stifling Internet freedom. A former AOL employee noted how AOL and other Internet Service Providers cooperate with the Bush administration in censoring email. The Patriot Act gave federal agencies the power to review information to the packet level and AOL was directed by agencies like the FBI to do more than sniff the subject line. The AOL term of service (TOS) has gradually been expanded to grant AOL virtually universal power regarding information. Many AOL users are likely unaware of the elastic clause, which says they will be bound by the current TOS and any TOS revisions which AOL may elect at any time in the future. Essentially, AOL users once agreed to allow the censorship and non-delivery of their email.

Microsoft has similar requirements for Hotmail as do Yahoo and Google for their respective e-mail services.
 

(Here: first & last paragraphs only)
Ghali Hassan, Biopiracy and GMOs: Fate of Iraq's agriculture: "While the Iraqi people are struggling to end the U.S. military Occupation and its associated violence, the fate of their food sources and agricultural heritage is being looted behind closed doors. Unless the colonisation of Iraq ends, the U.S. Occupation of Iraq will continue to have lasting and disastrous effects on Iraq's economy and Iraq's ability to feed its people.

Any new Iraqi government is obliged to repeal the illegally enacted Bremer's 100 Orders, including Order 81 and demand that the US pays compensation for the criminal damages that resulted from the Occupation. Iraq will never be sovereign and independent, unless its wealth and resources are protected and the sole property of the Iraqi people. The end of U.S. Occupation and colonisation of Iraq must be total and immediate.
 

Extract -
The Trial of Saddam Hussein / Anti-war Movement Must Reject Colonial 'Justice': The detention of Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants, along with tens of thousands of other Iraqis, is all based on a criminal, illegal war of aggression.

The Iraqi Special Tribunal and the trial of Saddam Hussein are also a violation of international law. The Geneva Convention, to which Washington is a signatory, explicitly forbids an occupying power from creating courts. In addition, the trial itself, along with the total isolation of the defendants and denial of all visitation and legal rights violates the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights. The defense lawyers who have stepped forward have been threatened and intimidated. Two lawyers on the defense team have been assassinated. Today in Iraq there is no judicial system. There are no codes, no laws, no courts. There still is no agreement on a constitution. The entire structure of the Iraqi state was destroyed. In its place is only the most brutal form of outright military domination.

The Iraqi Special Tribunal has been illegitimate since its very formation. It is a creation of L. Paul Bremer III of the U.S., former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority--the illegal, occupying power. Bremer initially appointed Salem Chalabi, the nephew of Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi, to organize and lead the court.

Chalabi had returned to Iraq from exile with the aid of U.S. tanks in April 2003. He opened a law office to draft the new laws that have reopened Iraq to foreign capital, in collaboration with the law firm of former Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith, a war profiteer, an ideologue of the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld cabal and a principal architect of the war.

Bremer also appointed the tribunal judges. The funding and the personnel are totally controlled by U.S. forces. The U.S. Congress has appropriated $128 million to fund the court. Of course, the court has no jurisdiction over crimes committed by U.S. forces in the invasion and occupation!

The trial underway now is part of the sustained U.S. effort to totally demonize Saddam Hussein. This has been an essential part of the 15-year war on Iraq. U.S. propaganda has relentlessly described Hussein as an evil madman, a brutal dictator and a threat to the entire planet who was poised to strike with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons within minutes. He was charged with having a role in 9/11 and being in league with al-Qaeda.

Every U.S. war against oppressed peoples and nations has begun with saturating the entire civilian population with war propaganda that so demonized the leader of the targeted population that any crime was treated as acceptable and beyond question. ...

Since the days of the Roman Empire, victor's justice has meant humiliation, degradation and placing the defeated leader in the dock in order to establish a new order. It hides the brutality of overwhelming force and gives legitimacy to the new rulers. ...*

The agents of U.S. imperialism have established corrupt and brutal dictatorships and trained and funded military rule from one corner of the globe to the other--from Indonesia to Chile to Congo. ...

Their problem with Saddam Hussein was not that he was a dictator. It was that he refused to surrender the sovereignty of Iraq. He refused to give U.S. corporations control over Iraqi oil, nationalized beginning in the 1960s. His worst crime in their eyes was that he refused to bow down to the New World Order.

Implicit in the call to bring the troops home now is the demand to stop the whole brutal process of recolonization. This means cancellation of the U.S. corporate contracts that have privatized and looted Iraqi resources, closing the hundreds of U.S. bases and the thousands of U.S. checkpoints, canceling the "search and destroy" missions and closing the secret prisons where tens of thousands of Iraqis are tortured and humiliated.

And closing the illegal, U.S.-created courts.
-----------------
* Emphasis added.
 

Cindy Sheehan takes campaign to UK
 

Muslims doubt U.S. intent in Middle East -poll: "The Gallup poll, conducted in 10 nations that comprise 80 percent of the world's Muslim population, found an average of only 31 percent of respondents per nation believed U.S. objectives were centered on establishing democracy.

"There was no data on Saudi Arabia for that question because pollsters were not allowed to ask it ..."
 

Torture and the CIA: Hardly any Americans . . are aware that not only do U.S. operatives occasionally torture "terrorist suspects" but that in many cases they torture them to death. The failure of the U.S. media to make any mention of this is the subject of an article by Peter Phillips, Hard Evidence of US Torturing Prisoners to Death Ignored by Corporate Media.

Phillips refers to a report by the ACLU* which quotes forty-four US military autopsy reports. Phillips asks: "How can the American public understand the gravity of the torture that is currently being committed in our name when the issue is being reported with no reference to the extent to which these crimes against humanity have gone?"

As a contribution to informing the American public as to what torture really means, we reproduce here a few of the autopsy reports. Remember that these deaths resulting from torture were produced by U.S. operatives, acting under the orders of commanding officers, who were implementing a policy which has its origins at the highest levels within the U.S. Department of Defense. These autopsy reports are not for people just brought in dead from the street — they are for people who died while in U.S. custody.

(Four reports listed)

These are cases where torture resulted in death. Probably most cases of torture by U.S. operatives don't result in death and don't give rise to autopsy reports such as these, so we don't hear about them. But we can conclude that it is standard practice to beat prisoners almost to death. In some cases it seems that homicide was intended. It was standard practice among the Romans to break the legs of people who were crucified, but who were lingering on for too long. This results in the fatal damage described in one of the autopsy reports given above:

The blunt force injuries to the legs resulted in extensive muscle damage, muscle necrosis and rhabomyolysis. Electrolyte disturbances primarily hyperkalemia (elevated blood potassium level) and metabolic acidosis can occur within hours of muscle damage. Massive sodium and water shifts occur, resulting in hypovolemic shock and casodilatation and later, acute renal failure.

It is unlikely that anyone would inflict such damage to the legs of a prisoner without intending to kill them.
-----------------------

* Highly recommend clicking on this link. Stunning documentation.
 

Extract -
Seymour Hersh, Where is the Iraq war headed next?: A high-level Pentagon war planner told me . . . that he has seen scant indication that the President would authorize a significant pullout of American troops if he believed that it would impede the war against the insurgency. ...

A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.

Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the President remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding.

Many of the military’s most senior generals are deeply frustrated, but they say nothing in public, because they don’t want to jeopardize their careers. The Administration has “so terrified the generals that they know they won’t go public,” a former defense official said. A retired senior C.I.A. officer with knowledge of Iraq told me that one of his colleagues recently participated in a congressional tour there. The legislators were repeatedly told, in meetings with enlisted men, junior officers, and generals that “things were fucked up.”* But in a subsequent teleconference with Rumsfeld, he said, the generals kept those criticisms to themselves.

Within the military, the prospect of using airpower as a substitute for American troops on the ground has caused great unease. For one thing, Air Force commanders, in particular, have deep-seated objections to the possibility that Iraqis eventually will be responsible for target selection. “Will the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of your own sect and blame someone else?” another senior military planner now on assignment in the Pentagon asked. “Will some Iraqis be targeting on behalf of Al Qaeda, or the insurgency, or the Iranians?”

The American air war inside Iraq today is perhaps the most significant—and underreported—aspect of the fight against the insurgency. The military authorities in Baghdad and Washington do not provide the press with a daily accounting of missions that Air Force, Navy, and Marine units fly or of the tonnage they drop, as was routinely done during the Vietnam War. One insight into the scope of the bombing in Iraq was supplied by the Marine Corps during the height of the siege of Falluja in the fall of 2004. “With a massive Marine air and ground offensive under way,” a Marine press release said, “Marine close air support continues to put high-tech steel on target. . . . Flying missions day and night for weeks, the fixed wing aircraft of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing are ensuring battlefield success on the front line.” Since the beginning of the war, the press release said, the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing alone had dropped more than five hundred thousand tons of ordnance.* “This number is likely to be much higher by the end of operations,” Major Mike Sexton said. In the battle for the city, more than seven hundred Americans were killed or wounded; U.S. officials did not release estimates of civilian dead, but press reports at the time told of women and children killed in the bombardments.

The insurgency operates mainly in crowded urban areas, and Air Force warplanes rely on sophisticated, laser-guided bombs to avoid civilian casualties. These bombs home in on targets that must be “painted,” or illuminated, by laser beams directed by ground units. “The pilot doesn’t identify the target as seen in the pre-brief”—the instructions provided before takeoff—a former high-level intelligence official told me. “The guy with the laser is the targeteer. Not the pilot. Often you get a ‘hot-read’ ”—from a military unit on the ground—“and you drop your bombs with no communication with the guys on the ground. You don’t want to break radio silence. The people on the ground are calling in targets that the pilots can’t verify.” He added, “And we’re going to turn this process over to the Iraqis?”

This military planner added that even today, with Americans doing the targeting, “there is no sense of an air campaign, or a strategic vision. We are just whacking targets—it’s a reversion to the Stone Age. There’s no operational art. That’s what happens when you give targeting to the Army—they hit what the local commander wants to hit.”*

Robert Pape, a political-science professor at the University of Chicago, who has written widely on American airpower, and who taught for three years at the Air Force’s School of Advanced Airpower Studies, in Alabama, predicted that the air war “will get very ugly” if targeting is turned over to the Iraqis. This would be especially true, he said, if the Iraqis continued to operate as the U.S. Army and Marines have done—plowing through Sunni strongholds on search-and-destroy missions. “If we encourage the Iraqis to clear and hold their own areas, and use airpower to stop the insurgents from penetrating the cleared areas, it could be useful,” Pape said. “The risk is that we will encourage the Iraqis to do search-and-destroy, and they would be less judicious about using airpower—and the violence would go up. More civilians will be killed, which means more insurgents will be created.”

The Air Force’s worries have been subordinated, so far, to the political needs of the White House. The Administration’s immediate political goal after the December elections is to show that the day-to-day conduct of the war can be turned over to the newly trained and equipped Iraqi military. It has already planned heavily scripted change-of-command ceremonies, complete with the lowering of American flags at bases and the raising of Iraqi ones.*

A senior United Nations diplomat told me that he was puzzled by the high American and British hopes for Allawi. “I know a lot of people want Allawi, but I think he’s been a terrific disappointment,” the diplomat said. “He doesn’t seem to be building a strong alliance, and at the moment it doesn’t look like he will do very well in the election.”

The second Pentagon consultant told me, “If Allawi becomes Prime Minister, we can say, ‘There’s a moderate, urban, educated leader now in power who does not want to deprive women of their rights.’ He would ask us to leave, but he would allow us to keep Special Forces operations inside Iraq—to keep an American presence the right way. Mission accomplished. A coup for Bush.”

Meanwhile, as the debate over troop reductions continues, the covert war in Iraq has expanded in recent months to Syria. A composite American Special Forces team, known as an S.M.U., for “special-mission unit,” has been ordered, under stringent cover, to target suspected supporters of the Iraqi insurgency across the border. (The Pentagon had no comment.) “It’s a powder keg,” the Pentagon consultant said of the tactic. “But, if we hit an insurgent network in Iraq without hitting the guys in Syria who are part of it, the guys in Syria would get away. When you’re fighting an insurgency, you have to strike everywhere—and at once.*”

* Emphasis added.
 

Charles Sullivan, The Arrogance of Power: Dr. Rice went before the world this week, looked us in the eye and lied through her teeth. The skill with which she carried out her mockery of the facts suggests considerable practice. ...

Even as Dr. Rice was busily sowing lies for the Bush regime’s agenda of global domination, legislation was worming its way through Congress that would exempt the CIA from prosecution for torturing people, as well the practice of rendition. This begs the question: If the United States does not torture people, or send detainees to foreign countries to be tortured, why do they need such legislation?*

* Emphasis added.
 

If, as Samuel Johnson said, "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," then "support our troops" is very close by. . . . In the lexicon of some, the only way to support our troops is to ensure that more of them die.
 

What We Said vs. What We did : "It is hard to believe that members of Congress studied intelligence reports diligently and truly believed Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Despite what they may have read or been told, didn't they see what the Administration was doing? Right in the midst of the search for bin Laden they moved troops and equipment to Kuwait. How could anyone watch the build-up growing in Kuwait in 2002 and early 2003 and not grasp that we were going to attack Iraq, come what may? How could anyone overlook that the administration was deploying in a manner that belied any threat from Saddam? Any member of Congress who believed there were WMD just wasn't paying attention, or worse."
 

Bush sees Iraq economy improving


Carrying the 'White Man's Burden' in Iraq: "Only an ideology like American exceptionalism could lead so many to conclude that the only country that can bring Iraq to "modernity" is the one that spent the past 15 years bombing it 'into the stone age.'"
 

Subject: Worse than Avian Flu *

The Center for Disease Control has issued a warning about a new virulent strain of Sexually Transmitted Disease.

The disease is contracted through dangerous and high-risk behavior. The disease is called Gonorrhea Lectim and pronounced "gonna re-elect him."

Many victims contracted it in 2004, after having been screwed for the past four years. Cognitive characteristics of individuals infected include: anti-social personality disorders, delusions of grandeur with messianic overtones, extreme cognitive dissonance, inability to incorporate new information, pronounced xenophobia and paranoia, inability to accept responsibility for own actions, cowardice masked by misplaced bravado, uncontrolled facial smirking, ignorance of geography and history, tendencies towards evangelical theocracy, categorical all-or-nothing behavior.

Naturalists and epidemiologists are amazed at how this destructive disease has evolved, having originated only a few years ago from a bush found in Texas.
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* Apologies for not acknowledging author. (Periodic updates on disease spread to follow.)
 

UK 'covered up' Israeli nuke deal


Iraq: The New Heroin Route
 

Kurt Nimmo, Bush Trashes Constitution, Few Notice (See above: December 09, 2005 7:11 PM)