Free Iraq

"And no one forced them to take a job with the Danish troops," says Gitte Lillelund Bech.
Disgusting. In 2003 the Iraqi people were not offered the possibility of holding a referendum on whether they preferred to have their country occupied and virtually obliterated, making survival employment such as offered the Danish troops one of the less unattractive options. One of the more unattractive options, of course, being starvation.
 

Child Prisoners in Iraq Suffering Same Abuse as Adults
 

Imad

What the interpeters are saying
 

Supporters of Evil
 

Democratic complicity in Bush's torture regimen: The Washington Post reports today that the Bush administration, beginning in 2002, repeatedly briefed leading Congressional Democrats on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees -- including, at various times, Jay Rockefeller, Nancy Pelosi, and Jane Harman -- regarding the CIA's "enhanced interrogation methods," including details about waterboarding and other torture measures. With one exception (Harman, who vaguely claims to have sent a letter to the CIA), these lawmakers not only failed to object to these policies, but affirmatively supported them.

Whether it's the war in Iraq or illegal surveillance or the abolition of habeas corpus and now the systematic use of torture, it's the Bush administration that conceived of the policies, implemented them and presided over their corrupt application. But it's Congressional Democrats at the leadership level who were the key allies and enablers, never getting their hands dirty with implementation -- and thus feigning theatrical, impotent outrage once each abuse was publicly exposed -- but nonetheless working feverishly the entire time to enable all of it every step of the way.
 

Mugshots of Bush Regime Criminals @ NY Public Library (Scroll down and fantasize.)
 

Bush Administration 'mugshot' exhibit angers right wingers
 

Future Combat Systems: Point and Click War Machine (Great. We'll never have to leave home.)
 

British PM to troops: Happy Xmas, your war is over!
 

Britain's Iraq war is ending. Who won?
 

Mortars hit Iraq prison; 7 inmates dead: Mortar shells slammed into an Interior Ministry prison on Monday, killing at least seven inmates and wounding 23, officials said. A fire broke out at one of Iraq's main oil refineries, but the U.S. military said it was due to an "industrial accident."

Mortar rounds hit a prison made up of several cell blocks, each containing prisoners accused of terrorism-related crimes or civil offenses, police said.

A hospital official said the inmates were still asleep when the mortars hit, one landing directly on a cell and two others nearby.
 

Mossad mission: Murder Iraqi scholars: More than 500 Iraqi scientists and professors have been murdered by Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, an Iraqi newspaper reports.

The report stated that the killings were part of a mission to get rid of those Iraqi nuclear specialists and university professors that refused to cooperate with the Zionist regime.

The assassinations were carried out by Mossad and the US Defense Department - the Pentagon.

According to the Al-Bayna newspaper, Tel Aviv sees these scientists posing a threat to the security of the Zionist regime, and has decided the best way to deal with this is to assassinate the offending intellectuals.

The Pentagon expressed its approval of such a scheme seven months ago, dispatching back-up for the Israeli commandoes, and also providing them with full personal records of the targeted victims.
 

When Jews and political money scandals collide
 

Victim: Gang-Rape Cover-Up by U.S., Halliburton/KBR: ... [A]fter she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.
 

حقائق سرية عن تفاصيل التغلغل الإيراني الاستخباري العسكري
http://www.sotaliraq.com/iraq-news-printerfriendly.php?id=4442
 

حقائق سرية عن تفاصيل التغلغل الإيراني الاستخباري العسكري
http://www.sotaliraq.com/iraqnews.php?id=4431
 

Iraqi FM: security pact will set time limit on US troop presence: ... "Our aim is for our security forces to reach a level of preparedness that leaves us with absolutely no need for foreign forces to remain in the country, but we haven't reached that stage yet."
 

Many analysts say what may reemerge is an Iraqi version of Lebanon's Hizbullah – a state within a state that embraces politics while maintaining a separate military and social structure that holds powerful sway at home and in the region.

"He is now in the process of reconstituting the [Mahdi] Army and removing all the bad people that committed mistakes and those that sullied its reputation. There will be a whole new structure and dozens of conditions for membership," says Sheikh Abdul-Hadi al-Mahamadawi, a turbaned cleric who commands Sadr's operation in Karbala.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1211/p01s06-wome.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1211/p01s06-wome.htm
 

Wayne Madsen Report (in full) -
December 11, 2007 -- Muzzling the diplomats: WMR has learned that U.S. diplomats and other personnel assigned to the US embassy in Baghdad and other diplomatic posts in Iraq are being required to sign special security oaths that require five year periods of silence subsequent to their tours in Baghdad.

The special requirement apparently only extends to US personnel assigned to Iraq. The Bush administration is apparently trying to prevent witnesses in criminal and civil cases from coming forward in testimony.

The US Embassy in Baghdad has been the focal point for a number of investigations involving U.S. government and contractor personnel, including Blackwater security guards accused of murdering Iraqi civilians, a gang rape of a female Halliburton/Kellogg Brown & Root employee in Baghdad, the use of foreign virtual slave laborers in the construction of the US Embassy building in Baghdad, smuggling of weapons to insurgents by US contractors, the loss of weapons and other supplies in Iraq, and major contract fraud.
 

Gunmen kill head of Baghdad mental hospital
 

Suicide bomber strikes outside homes of Iraqi politicians
 

Iraq rejects permanent US bases
 

Israeli tanks enter southern Gaza Strip
 

Gitmo ex-prosecutor: 'Full, fair, open' trials not possible
 

The "national bird of Israel" (V U L T U R E)
 

Tutu: 'United States and...Britain [express] the same arguments for detention without trial that were used by the apartheid government'
 

( . . . and we wish he were. )
 

Ask rolls out search privacy tool
 

Iraq is changing now (Authored by "a senior fellow for defence policy at the Council on Foreign Relations", a group characterizing itself as "independent and nonpartisan". HOGWASH.)
 

Triple car bombs strike southern Iraq town of Amara
 

Death squads, disappearances and torture: The world is made up, as Captain Segura in Graham Greene's 1958 novel Our Man in Havana put it, of two classes: the torturable and the untorturable. "There are people," Segura explained, "who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea."

Then - so Greene thought - Catholics, particularly Latin American Catholics, were more torturable than Protestants. Now, of course, Muslims hold that distinction, victims of a globalized network of offshore and outsourced imprisonment coordinated by Washington and knitted together by secret flights, concentration camps, and black-site detention centers. The CIA's deployment of Orwellian "Special Removal Units" to kidnap terror suspects in Europe, Canada, the Middle East and elsewhere and the whisking of these "ghost prisoners" off to Third World countries to be tortured goes, today, by the term "extraordinary rendition", a hauntingly apt phrase. "To render" means not just to hand over but to extract the essence of a thing, as well as to hand out a verdict and "give in return or retribution" - good descriptions of what happens during torture sessions.

Death Squads: Clandestine paramilitary units, nominally independent from established security agencies yet able to draw on the intelligence and logistical capabilities of those agencies, are the building blocks for any effective system of state terror. ...

Throughout the 1960s, Latin America and Southeast Asia functioned as the two primary laboratories for US counterinsurgents, who moved back and forth between the regions, applying insights and fine-tuning tactics. By the early 1960s, death-squad executions were a standard feature of US counterinsurgency strategy in Vietnam, soon to be consolidated into the infamous Phoenix Program, which between 1968 and 1972 "neutralized" more than 80,000 Vietnamese - 26,369 of whom were "permanently eliminated".

As in Latin America, so too in Vietnam, the point of death squads was not just to eliminate those thought to be working with the enemy, but to keep potential rebel sympathizers in a state of fear and anxiety. To do so, the US Information Service in Saigon provided thousands of copies of a flyer printed with a ghostly looking eye. The "terror squads" then deposited that eye on the corpses of those they murdered or pinned it "on the doors of houses suspected of occasionally harboring Viet Cong agents". The technique was called "phrasing the threat" - a way to generate a word-of-mouth terror buzz.

Disappearances: Next up on the counterinsurgency curriculum was Central America, where, in the 1960s, US advisors helped put into place the infrastructure needed not just to murder but "disappear" large numbers of civilians. In the wake of the Cuban Revolution, Washington had set out to "professionalize" Latin America's security agencies - much in the way the Bush administration now works to "modernize" the intelligence systems of its allies in the president's "war on terror".

Over the next two and a half decades, US-funded and trained Central American security forces would disappear tens of thousands of citizens and execute hundreds of thousands more. When supporters of the "war on terror" advocated the exercise of the "Salvador Option", it was this slaughter they were talking about.

Torture: Torture is the animating spirit of this triad, the unholiest of this unholy trinity. In Chile, Pinochet's henchmen killed or disappeared thousands - but they tortured tens of thousands. In Uruguay and Brazil, the state only disappeared a few hundred, but fear of torture and rape became a way of life, particularly for the politically engaged. Torture, even more than the disappearances, was meant not so much to get one person to talk as to get everybody else to shut up.

... One Pentagon "torture manual" distributed in at least five Latin American countries described at length "coercive" procedures designed to "destroy [the] capacity to resist".
 

Questions Linger After Hayden Testimony: Ex-Agent Says Waterboarding OK'd at the Top

At the White House, press secretary Dana Perino said the CIA interrogation program approved by the president is safe, tough, effective and legal.

"It's no secret that the president approved a lawful program in order to interrogate hardened terrorists," Perino said. "We do not torture. ... "
 

The Honor of Being Human: Why Do You Support? Obedience is the term used to describe the demand by a person in a superior position (superior psychologically, legally and/or in terms of the power he possesses in some other form) that a person in an inferior position conduct himself in a particular manner. The essence of obedience is the demand without more: a reason may be provided, but a reason is unnecessary. Moreover, the reason may be unconvincing or incoherent, and it may contradict other reasons provided for other demands. Most importantly, the reason need not be one that the person in the inferior position agrees with. Informed, voluntary agreement occurs when a person is presented with a reason(s) to act in a certain manner; he understands and is ultimately convinced of the validity of the reason(s), and therefore acts in the manner suggested.

Obedience is the opposite of voluntary, uncoerced agreement: the understanding and agreement of the person in the inferior position are not required, and are often not sought at all. The person in the inferior position may profoundly disagree with the reason(s) offered for the demand, if any. When the person in the inferior position obeys, he does so because of his certain knowledge that if he does not, he will be punished in some form: psychologically, legally, socially, or in some other way. Thus, the primary (although not the sole) motivation that ensures obedience is negative in nature: it is not the promise of a reward (even though certain rewards may be offered), but the assurance that he will not suffer consequences that are painful in varying degrees, i.e., that he will not be punished.

... We [in the United States] exist in a netherworld, where the few remaining fragments of light slowly vanish: freedom no longer exists, and we wait to see what will replace it and just how oppressive it will be. Except for today's usual suspects -- those who are Arab or Muslim, those who are designated terrorists whether they are or not, "illegal" immigrants, many of those who are not male, white and affluent -- the state has yet to tell us who the specific victims will be. If there should be another major terrorist attack in America, these questions may well be answered more quickly than we would wish.

So what does an adult of conscience do, confronted by the specter of The Imminent, but Not-Yet, Not-Quite Dictatorship? ...
 

Follow the Leader: Halliburton Rape Case Reflects Bush Ethos
 

Sorry About Electrocuting Your Balls—But You Have To Understand, I Was Scared!
 

Israeli siege imposed on the Gaza Strip
 

“We—Israeli soldiers—were put there to punish the Palestinians"
 

Lebanon blast kills army general
 

Bush: "I wasn't a knee-walking drunk." ("But let me tell you what I am.")
 

"PREPARE FOR GLORY!"
 

British army to hand over Basra to Iraq on Dec 16
 

White House Is Confident of Broad Support on Iran: Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, expressed support for Mr. Bush’s efforts.
 

Trial for Two Israeli Spies May Be Thwarted: To those ... who have had the scales removed from their eyes with regards to the gangsterism of Zionist political maneuvering, this latest represents a subtle yet unequivocal threat on the part of Israel and her supporters, akin to a mugger pointing an unseen gun at his would-be victim from within a coat pocket.

The defense’s argument ... is that the top-secret information ... received by the two accused spies Rosen and Weissman from former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin (convicted of espionage and sentenced to 13 years) and which they in turn passed along to Israel was ‘nothing out of the ordinary’ and the sort of thing that ‘happens all the time’ between good friends like America and Israel.

Based on everything known about the relationship between Israel and America (and particularly with the administration of George Bush) this may be the one time in its long history of lying that AIPAC is actually telling the truth. The information passed along by Pentagon analyst Franklin is undoubtedly a drop in the bucket compared to what has most likely been passed along to Israel by the previously-named officials now being called to testify.

In other words, Rice and the other administration officials being forced to admit under oath that they themselves passed national defense secrets on to representatives of a foreign government would in the process be incriminating and opening themselves up for possible criminal prosecution, and this is obviously something not likely to occur.

... Keep in mind that Michael Mukasey, an orthodox Jew who was directly involved in sending back to Israel a whole gaggle of Mossad agents immediately following 9/11 (including the infamous ‘High-Fivers’ seen filming the destruction of the Twin Towers and cheering) has been made head of the US Justice Department. ...

When once speaking about AIPAC, accused spy Steve Rosen compared it to a ‘night flower’ that ‘thrives in the dark and withers in the light of day’. He was not speaking poetically as much as accurately, and he knew it. If Americans knew the extent to which their nation has been plunged into the bloody affairs of Middle East politics, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the gathering storm involving Iran and Syria as a result of this lobby’s influence they would burn down the headquarters and run its members out of the country. (emphasis added)
 

Israel's Palestinians Speak Out: The Annapolis peace talks regard me as an interloper in my own land. Israel's deputy prime minister, Avigdor Lieberman, argues that I should "take [my] bundles and get lost." Henry Kissinger thinks I ought to be summarily swapped from inside Israel to the would-be Palestinian state.

We are referred to by leading Israeli politicians as a "demographic problem." ...

Palestinians inside Israel have developed a history and identity after nearly sixty years of hard work and struggle. We are not simply pawns to be shuffled to the other side of the board. We expect no more and no less than the right to equality in the land of our ancestors. Israeli Jews have now built a nation, and have the right to live here in peace. But Israel cannot be both Jewish and democratic, nor can it find the security it seeks by continuing to deny our rights, nor those of Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, nor those of Palestinian refugees. It is time for us to share this land in a true democracy, one that honors and respects the rights of both peoples as equals.
 

Wayne Madsen Report (in full) -
December 12, 2007 -- Sources: Death of US Defense Attache in Cyprus was from "foul play.": Previously, WMR reported on the suspicious deaths of active duty US military personnel who were investigating massive contract fraud involving the US occupation of Iraq. Days before his supposed suicide by a "self-inflicted" gunshot wound in a Baghdad trailer, West Point Honor Board member and Iraqi police and security forces trainer Col. Ted Westhusing reported in e-mail to the United States that "terrible things were going on in Iraq." He also said he hoped he would make it back to the United States alive. Westhusing had three weeks left in his tour of duty in Iraq when he allegedly shot himself in June 2005. Westhusing was investigating contract fraud by US Investigations, a Carlyle Group company.

WMR has now learned from reliable sources that the July 2, 2007, "suicide" of Lt. Col. Thomas Mooney, the US Defense Attache in Nicosia, Cyprus, whose body was found with a "self-inflicted cut to the throat" next to an embassy vehicle in a remote area 30 miles west of Nicosia, was investigating Iraq-related contract fraud involving companies headquartered in Cyprus, some of which are linked to the Russian-Israeli Mafia.

The US ambassador to Cyprus Ronald Schlicher quickly ruled out foul play in Mooney's death. Schlicher, before taking up his post in Cyprus, was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and Coordinator for Iraq in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Prior to that Schlicher served with the Coalition Provisional Authority, first as Regional Coordinator for the North and then as Director of the Office of Provincial Outreach.

Cyprus was linked to the fraud in Iraq involving the GOP-connected security contractor Custer Battles. WMR previously reported that Custer Battles co-owner Scott Custer included former Lebanese Shia Amal official Mohammed Darwish, the owner of Cyprus-based Laru, Ltd., into the Custer Battles organization and decision making process.

The Italian police are investigating an arms smuggling ring that re-sold US-supplied weapons to Iraq. The investigation, called Operation Parabellum, involves at least one front company in Cyprus that is linked to the Italian and Russian-Israeli Mafias.

On September 4, 2006, Army Lt. Col. Marshall Gutierrez, the chief logistics officer at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, who was investigating over-payments for goods and services and other fraud, supposedly committed suicide in his base quarters after ingesting prescription sleeping pills and anti-freeze. In December 2006, Army Major Gloria Davis, a contracting officer at Camp Arifjan, allegedly committed suicide in Kuwait after she admitted to receiving $225,000 in bribes from Lee Dynamics, an Army logistics contractor.

(Everyone commits suicide.)
 

"Pro-Muslim" Internet Yellow Pages Collects Money For Israeli Military
 

Ten Reasons Why "Save Darfur" is a PR Scam to Justify the Next US Oil and Resource Wars in Africa:
10. Blackwater and other U.S. mercenary contractors, the unofficial armed wings of the Republican party and the Pentagon are eagerly pitching their services as part of the solution to the Darfur crisis.
 

The Constitution isn't a security blanket. If we want to minimize the number of terrorist attacks on American citizens or US institutions; we should stop using war as an implement of foreign policy. As Noam Chomsky says, “The best way to stop terrorism; is stop committing it.” That's good advice. We ought to put that on a billboard in front of the White House so the occupants can mull it over every day on their way to work.

The real reason that torture should be rejected is because it confers more authority on the state than is prudent for the safety and welfare of “We the people”. The state is now—and has always been—the greatest threat to human rights and civil liberties. That's truer today--in our post 9-11 world--than ever before. The state is the natural enemy of personal freedom.
 

There’s A Press Blackout on S 1959, the Thought Crime Prevention Bill; Why?
 

White House press secretary admits she didn't know what Cuban Missile Crisis was (But surely you can't expect the poor woman to know everything!)
 

Major analytical article -
9/11, JFK, and War: Recurring Patterns in America’s Deep Events
 

Sixteen bodies found in a ditch north of Baghdad
 

Only one thing unites Iraq: hatred of the US: Nothing is resolved in Iraq. Power is wholly fragmented. The Americans will discover, as the British learned to their cost in Basra, that they have few permanent allies in Iraq. It has become a land of warlords in which fragile ceasefires might last for months and might equally collapse tomorrow.
 

Torture and torment in 2007 AD: The “only democracy in the Middle East” has imprisoned at least 600,000 Palestinians since the ethnic cleansing of those native people started in 1948 en masse. Remember that the population was hardly a million to start with. Many are arrested at dead of night in a manner similar to that taught by Ord Wingate to the Zionist terrorist squads in the 1930s – the Special Night Squads.
 

Freedom lost: After the invasion of Iraq, the US government claimed that women there had 'new rights and new hopes'. In fact their lives have become immeasurably worse, with rapes, burnings and murders now a daily occurrence.
 

Mobile Labs to Target Iraqis for Death: U.S. forces in Iraq soon will be equipped with high-tech equipment that will let them process an Iraqi’s biometric data in minutes and help American soldiers decide whether they should execute the person or not, according to its inventor.

Rather than relying on physical descriptions, U.S. forces could scan a suspect’s eyes or check his fingerprints -- and instantaneously cross-check it with data stored in West Virginia -- before deciding, in Duong’s words, "Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?”
 

Wayne Madsen Report (in full) -
December 13, 2007 -- Pentagon has "Wal Mart" for counter-terrorism vendors: In 1999, the Combating Terrorism Technology Support Office (CTTSO) began as just another carved out niche in the massive Pentagon bureaucracy with responsibility for overseeing the inter-agency Technical Support Working Group (TSWG), a group of representatives from various government agencies who identify research and development requirements for combating terrorism (CbT).

However, since 9/11, the CTTSO has become a virtual one stop shopping and procurement center for over 100 government agencies, including the Federal Reserve Board, Food and Drug Administration, and Supreme Court, and hundreds of vendors, called "performers," eager to sell their anti-terrorism products and services to the federal government. CTTSO resides in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC).

The CTTSO has two other components in addition to the TWSG, the Explosive Ordnance Disposal/Low Intensity Conflict office and the Irregular Warfare Support office. The latter's responsibilities include coming up with "novel approaches to counter the rise of extremist ideologies in order to defeat insurgent groups and enabling enterprises."

The Technical Support Working Group is sponsored by the State Department's Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. CTTSO has agreements with five international partners: Canada, Israel, United Kingdom, Australia, and Singapore. However, there are also Swiss and French "performers" under contract to CTTSO.

The major role of the State Department's Coordinator for Counterterrorism with CTTSO is noteworthy. The job was once held by Cofer Black, who is now the Vice Chairman of Blackwater USA and the chairman of its intelligence gathering subsidiary, Total Intelligence Solutions. Black also heads up the Black Group, a consulting firm. Not surprisingly, Blackwater USA is a CTTSO "performer." The Black Group's partner is Signature Science LLC, a division of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. Southwest Research is also a CTTSO "performer."

CTTSO is sponsoring a vendor fair on February 21, 2008 at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC.
 

Light + Sound = New Weapon (If it's not lethal why bother?)
 

THE U.S. COULD STILL STRIKE IRAN BUT IT IS NOW UP TO ISRAEL TO STRIKE THE FIRST BLOW: In the end the NIE has changed nothing in terms of the endgame for both the US and Israel who want regime change in Iran. What it has done, in fact, is simply made it easier for Israel to take the decision to do the job. There is no more procrastination.
 

Syria hints at 'Israel's connection' in Lebanese general's killing
(See above, December 12, 2007 10:39 AM)
 

(See photos)
'Harmless' Area Denial Weapons Facts...And Burns: The weapon does not generate a small amount of "harmless" microwave power. It generates 100 THOUSAND WATTS of microwave power.
 

Australia's church head blasts Israel: The Catholic News reported that the trip "has enabled the delegates to see first-hand the suffering and human rights violations of Palestinians due to the 'apartheid' separation wall and the squalid condition inside the refugee camps."

Representatives of the Catholic Church, Uniting Church and Baptist Church also participated in the mission.
 

Just a little something on the home front -
Man says Knoxville police beat, arrested him in mistaken identity
(Oh well, he could have been the right man.)
 

Blockade of Gaza even makes dying difficult
 

Video (4 min), THE BEST WAR EVER


Video (3 min), Junk Media Makes Us Sick


Video (18 min), "Yes, I Am a Terrorist"


Wayne Madsen Report (in full) -
December 14-16, 2007 -- French police detain journalist: French police have detained and put under criminal investigation French journalist Guillaume Dasquie, the co-author of "Forbidden Truth," for which this editor wrote an introduction. Dasquie was also my editor when I was the Washington correspondent for Intelligence Online of Paris.

Suffice it to say that Guillaume Dasquie is a first rate journalist who is now facing the wrath of the regime of the long time Mossad spy President Nicolas Sarkozy. I reported some intriguing preliminary intelligence regarding the Taliban and US oil companies prior to 9/11 terror attacks. This information was reported to my Paris bureau. In addition, Intelligence Online and Dasquie reported on details I reported about the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) report on pre-9/11 Israeli "art student" activity and the story was carried by the French newspaper Le Monde.

The French neocon presidency is a dying regime that won the election fraudulently. The Clearstream money from Russian-Israeli gangsters that ended up in Sarkozy's coffers is just the beginning of a long track record of malfeasance by France's "little Hitler," as one French intelligence colonel referred to the impetuous and vertically-challenged French president.

The Committee to Protect Journalists issued the following statement regarding Dasquie:

New York, December 10, 2007 — The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned about a criminal investigation launched by French authorities against Guillaume Dasquié, a reporter for the daily Le Monde, on accusations of publishing state secrets related to the 9/11 hijackings.

Officers from the Directorate of Territorial Security, a counterespionage agency, searched Dasquié’s Paris home on Wednesday. They detained him for 48 hours, during which time he was interrogated and pressured to reveal his sources, according to international news reports. Dasquié faces five years in prison and a fine of 75,000 euros (US$110,000) under Article 413-11 of France’s penal code if convicted.

'We are troubled by the criminal probe against Guillaume Dasquié and his detention for two days by French security services who pressured him to reveal his sources,' CPJ’s Executive Director Joel Simon said. 'Dasquié should not be prosecuted for serving the public’s right to know.'

On Thursday, investigating magistrate Philippe Coirre, who is in charge of the probe, filed preliminary charges against Dasquié. Under French law, the filing of preliminary charges means the investigation has found sufficient evidence to suggest that Dasquié has been involved in a crime, The Associated Press reported.

The probe against Dasquié stems from his April 16 article in Le Monde, titled 'September 11: the French had long known,' which said French intelligence services, the General Directorate of External Security (DGSE), had warned their U.S. counterparts of a possible terrorist plot that involved the hijacking of planes and crashing them into buildings some eight months before 9/11, according to international news reports.
The article contained excerpts from a DGSE file titled 'Aircraft hijack plan by radical Islamists'—part of a 328-page classified report on al-Qaeda activities, which Le Monde said the DGSE files in its possession contained maps, analyses, graphics, and satellite photos, Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported. said it possessed. One excerpt from the report, dated January 5, 2001, said al-Qaeda had a list of potential airline targets, which included the United and American Airlines carriers used in the 9/11 attacks, the AP said."

Dasquie is just the latest target of Sarkozy's particularly revolting quasi-dictatorship that targets Arabs, Muslims, and anyone who has criticized Israeli policies. Dasquie's criminal probe follows indictments of former French President Jacques Chirac and former Prime Minister Dominique DeVillepin, both of whom are aware of Sarkozy's close ties to Israeli intelligence and the Russian-Israeli mafia that did so much to fatten his wallet via Clearstream accounts in Luxembourg. The criminal probe of Dasquie is just more of the same from a Paris regime that takes its orders from Jerusalem and allied circles in New York and Washington.

The probe of Dasquie by Israel's stooges in Paris, including Sarkozy and Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, is more proof of Israel's direct involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Israel's use of Sarkozy as their messenger boy provides more ample evidence that Israel does not want deeper investigations of the perpetrators behind 9/11.
 

9/11’s history of tragic events: ... David Simpson at The Chicago Blog, in 9/11: Past and Future notes that in addition to “the assassination of Allende on September 11, 1973; [we find] the British Mandate in Palestine on September 11, 1922; the U.S. invasion of Honduras on September 11, 1919; and the defeat of the Ottoman armies before the gates of Vienna on September 11, 1683.”
 

The hidden holocaust -- our civilizational crisis, part 1: The holocaust in history: ... [F]or five hundred years, hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples were slaughtered, decimated, deported, enslaved, starved, exterminated, impoverished, and forcibly assimilated into an emerging world system dominated by Western Europe. This was how the global values and politico-economic structures of our civilization came into being. Globalization . . . the bloody legacy of a 500-year killing machine.


The hidden holocaust -- our civilizational crisis, part 2: Exporting democracy: We may well believe that what the Anglo-American centres of imperial power are doing in Iraq is right. But the truth is that some of the worst crimes in history were committed by people who truly believed that what they were doing was right. If we have any semblance of humanity left in us as we stand and stare pathetically, immobile, at the scale of the horror our governments have wrought, then our most urgent task must be to discover why our global system, as it has expanded not only during the era of traditional modern “colonization” but even moreso in the era of postmodern “globalization," systematically generates genocidal violence against hundreds of millions of people across the South; and systematically finds ways to legitimize this violence as normal, functional, necessary . . . for us to live, breathe and prosper.
 

It's a fragile 'quiet' in Iraq: The decline in violence in Iraq rests uneasily on several unrelated and loosely related processes. The "surge" is certainly one of them, but it is not foremost - maybe not even in Baghdad where it began. The number of these processes and their fragility do not inspire confidence that the decline in violence can continue, let alone help to promote desirable political development. Nor are they likely to allow the US to leave Iraq gracefully in the foreseeable future.
 

China leaves the US and India trailing: In an audacious swoop, China has beaten off rivals from the US, Canada and Russia to secure a US$4 billion copper project in Afghanistan, leaving India to build hospitals and schools. And this week, China Petroleum Corporation sealed a $2 billion oil and gas development project in Iran, just as Delhi - at Washington's bidding - slapped banking restrictions on Tehran. By hitching its colors to the US-Israeli bandwagon, India is now paying the price for overlooking the reality that Iran is the only really viable regional power in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf
 

Bush Threatens To Veto Bill That Bans Torture
 

Poll Shows More Optimism on War: Still, President Bush's approval ratings on the war have improved ... . (blah, blah, blah: Washington Post)
 

Journalists probed for travel to 'enemy' states
 

Harsh reality of Iraqi orphans: Unlike orphans in many countries in the world, most Iraqi orphans lost their parents around the same time and under horrible circumstances.
 

Prison interrogation techniques in Israel: Now you are paralyzed, as we promised
 

Intrusive Brain Reading Surveillance Technology: Hacking the Mind: "We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated.

The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain." - Dr José Delgado. Director of Neuropsychiatry, Yale University Medical School Congressional Record, No. 26, Vol. 118 February 24, 1974.
 

U.S. paid $32M for Iraqi base that wasn't built (. . . and $trillions for democracy that "wasn't built.")
 

The secret weapon of the stars - Israeli bodyguards
 

Americans have dim view of Bush, Dem leadership (Anyone seen the film Dumb and Dumber?)
 

Crashed Gitmo Torture Jet Did Double Duty as a Coke Mule
 

Privatising Zionism: Increasingly, Israel is handing over its 'Judaisation' project to private firms - leading to a corrosion of accountability

For less than four dollars an hour, the Jewish teenagers removed furniture, clothes, kitchenware and toys from the homes and loaded them on to trucks. As they worked diligently alongside the many policemen who had come to secure the destruction of 30 houses in two unrecognised Bedouin villages, Bedouin teenagers stood by watching their homes being emptied.

When all the belongings had been removed, the bulldozers rapidly destroyed the homes. All those present, Jews and Bedouins, were Israeli citizens; together they learned an important lesson in the discrimination characterising civic life in the Jewish state.

The current demolitions are part of a strategy that began with the foundation of the state of Israel. Its ultimate objective is the Judaisation of space. ...

After witnessing the demolitions, a Bedouin activist asked one of the Jewish teenagers why he had agreed to participate in the eviction. Without hesitating, the teenager replied: "I am a Zionist and what we are doing here today is Zionism."

... While, traditionally, the state itself performed the task of Judiasing space, over the years the government has been outsourcing more and more of its responsibilities to private firms. The teenager himself was hired by a personnel agency, which was employed by the state to carry out the job of expelling Bedouins from their homes.

The process of privatising Zionism has been slow. For over five decades the state was the sole agent responsible for all planning of new villages, towns and cities, and only the construction was carried out by private contractors. Now, land from which the Bedouins are being expelled is sold at rock bottom prices to big real estate moguls, who are then responsible not only for building Jewish villages and towns, but also for planning them. The private contractors manage to garner larger returns than ever before, since the difference in price between "unplanned" land and land that has undergone "planning" is enormous.

If one drives a few kilometres further and crosses the Green Line into the occupied Palestinian territories, one may notice that military checkpoints are also being privatised. In the past year, at least five such checkpoints have been handed over to subcontractors and are currently managed by corporate warriors. The difference between IDF soldiers and corporate warriors is that the latter operate within the gray areas of the law. They are Israel's Blackwater. Thus, as this privatising trend continues the checkpoints in the West Bank, which have already earned notoriety under the management of the Israeli military, will surely become sites of more misery for Palestinians trying to pass through.
 

Fox: Americans not above torture, and shouldn't be (OK, it's decision time now. Just WHO is a 'terrorist'?)
 

A jogger's guide to Baghdad's Green Zone ( ! ! ! )
 

U.S. and Iranians postpone talks on Iraqi violence
 

Video (1 min), Bushed! Keith Olbermann takes a minute to analyze to corruption in this wonderful administration.
 

Senate Bill 1959 to Criminalize Thoughts, Blogs, Books and Free Speech Across America: The end of Free Speech in America has arrived at our doorstep. It's a new law called the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, and it is worded in a clever way that could allow the U.S. government to arrest and incarcerate any individual who speaks out against the Bush Administration, the war on Iraq, the Department of Homeland Security or any government agency (including the FDA).
 

(Highly recommended article for people/westerners like myself who struggle to understand.)
Iraq Does Exist: There is no doubt that the premeditated aggression and murderous Occupation of Iraq by U.S. forces and their collaborators have succeeded in destroying the physical state of Iraq and terrorising the Iraqi population. “But, of course, the spirit of the Iraqi people is indestructible. They cannot be broken. They will resist, drive out all intruders, and they will recover. The people of Iraq will overcome the catastrophes of recent years”, writes Denis Halliday, former UN assistant secretary-general and one of the very few honourable voices in the West to publicly condemn the deliberate genocide in Iraq.

Iraq does exist. We should never forget the fact that there is an Iraqi nation and nationalism represented by legitimate National Iraqi Resistance. The U.S. government and its collaborators may have succeeded in killing many innocent Iraqis and removed a sovereign government but the U.S. failed and will not success in its attempt to destroy the Iraqi nation and the Iraq people’s will to resist the Occupation.
 

US Must Reevaluate Its Relationship With Israel
 

Why a Palestinian "State" is a Punitive Construct: The intention behind the state today is to constrain Palestinian aspirations territorially, to force them to give up on their moral rights, renege on their history and submit to Israel's diktats on fundamental issues of sovereignty.
 

Bush supports Russia sending enriched uranium to Iran ( ? ? ? )