‘Religion is Morally Neutral’ - Desmond Tutu

You said George Bush should admit that he made a mistake. Were you surprised at his re-election?
I still can't believe that it really could have happened. Just look at the facts on the table: He’d gone into a war having misled people—whether deliberately or not—about why he went to war. You would think that would have knocked him out [of the race.] It didn’t. Look at the number of American soldiers who have died since he claimed that the war had ended. And yet it seems this doesn't make most Americans worry too much. I was teaching in Jacksonville, Fla., [during the election campaign] and I was shocked, because I had naively believed all these many years that Americans genuinely believed in freedom of speech. [But I] discovered there that when you made an utterance that was remotely contrary to what the White House was saying, then they attacked you. For a South African the déjà vu was frightening. They behaved exactly the same way that used to happen here [during apartheid]—vilifying those who are putting forward a slightly different view.

There are thousands of nuclear weapons at Bush's command, including those of Tony Blair's UK and Sharon's Israel. Bush's new permissive nuclear doctrines, and his enthusiastic neocon administration, have set the stage for nuclear wars. Americans accept that, as easily as Jim Jones loyal followers accepted his leadership (and poisoning) in order to go to a heavenly world. That's the prospect at this time. It is possible, but looks unlikely, that there will be enough sane Americans left with the power to stop Bush before he commits his arsenals to the unthinkable.
If the worst happens, that's the end of our existance. No second chances.

...Whether through self-censorship or junk education, our country's children are paying the price for the political aggression of the far right. Robert Frost once wrote, "Education is the ability listen to almost anything without losing your temper."

Fallujah Bombed by US to Rubble

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

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

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

NZ ARMS RACE CAN LEAD TO WAR

"One thing leads to another". So people should think it through carefully before they allow NZ to further steps up the escalation ladder. This also is a strong argument for the Labour Government to resist the lobbying efforts of NZ's arms industry to go further, and reverse the dangerous trends. We thank Labour for maintaining NZ's 1987 Nuclear Free Law, but warn then against being seduced into abandoning it.

"Made in New Zealand: a label to be proud of ?
Not when it is the label on shoot-to-kill training equipment, grenades, land mines effect simulators, weapons firing control systems, 'special purpose' ammunition, and aerial bombing score systems ...
And not when the label is used by NZ companies that have overseas parent companies involved in the manufacture and deployment of nuclear weapons." [quote from the new No WARP! leaflet]

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

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

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

War Is Peace:

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

FASCISM ENDS FREEDOM

The 615 page Intelligence Reform legislation is "a more stunning attack on the Bill Of Rights than the Patriot Act" as Mike Whitney points out below.

The new Intelligence reform bill is a more stunning attack on the Bill of Rights than the Patriot Act. Most people have no idea how dramatically their "inalienable" rights have been savaged, or to what extent the Congress has sold them out. It's no exaggeration to say that the foundation of personal liberty, guaranteed in the law, is cracking at the base. It'll be a miracle if we can put it back together in time to pass it on to our children.
As usual, the role of the media has been pivotal in obfuscating the details of the bill. They've fed the hysteria over the establishment of a NID; (National Intelligence Director) a glamour position that has been represented as vital to stopping another 9-11. What rubbish. Teaching Condi Rice how to read a simple e-mail from bin Laden would be twice as effective.

Nuclear Weapons Used Against Iran?

Given Iran's defences (below), and that US forces are already over extended in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it follows that the US may find an excuse to use nuclear weapons if it decides, or Israel decides, to go to war against Iran. The US may believe that the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons will immediately change the situation beyond the capacity of Iran to defend itself and give the US a quick victory. By demonising Iran, and perhaps blaming it for some new terrorist incident, which they can also use as an excuse to suppress US dissent, it will attempt to get the acceptance of the US population and the rest of the world for this first use of nuclear weapons since the bombing of Japan in 1945.

TEHRAN - The United States and Israel may be contemplating military operations against Iran, as per recent media reports, yet Iran is not wasting any time in preparing its own counter-operations in the event an attack materializes.
A week-long combined air and ground maneuver has just concluded in five of the southern and western provinces of Iran, mesmerizing foreign observers, who have described as "spectacular" the massive display of high-tech, mobile operations, including rapid-deployment forces relying on squadrons of helicopters, air lifts, missiles, as well as hundreds of tanks and tens of thousands of well-coordinated personnel using live munition. Simultaneously, some 25,000 volunteers have so far signed up at newly established draft centers for "suicide attacks" against any potential intruders in what is commonly termed "asymmetrical warfare".      Asia Times

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

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

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

nor for his orphaned sons'
...Baha Mousa had been brutally beaten while hooded and tied up--none of the other prisoners suffering with him were ever charged with any crime--by soldiers who gave them the names of footballers. His father was a police colonel and had seen his son before his arrest at a local hotel. He even acquired a note from the arresting officer that Baha would be looked after. His name--typically--was meaningless: it was signed "Second Lieutenant Mike".

The Intellectually Damaged Society

Stasi establishes and documents the religious deterioration and subjugation of the American psyche. America is in the hands of a band of dedicated criminal religious nutters. They are daily becoming more powerful and entrenched. They use queer religious doctrines to justify any act, any risk or any crime. It's all done for the lord you see, for his greater glory and to fulfil his heavenly promise. Everything and anything can be justified and excused.
So killing 100,000 innocent Iraqis, imprisoning and torturing thousands more, and destroying their country for no legitimate reason are not crimes. It's heavenly ordained and guided by our ever-loving god. We are God's chosen people. He inspires us to do what we do.

Religious Exploitation, and the New American Creed
Blind faith is not a plan for any society’s future survival; neither is it cognition worthy of the fully developed human mind. Blind faith is just a pretty mask that hides the ugly face of ignorance. Today, America wears that mask, and it does not represent the moral or ethical or religious “values” of its most rational citizens. Neither is it fooling anyone but other Americans.

History of the Antichrist Legend and

Is Bush the Antichrist?

Documenting What Could Be The Highest Crime In THe History Of Our Country - America
You Be The Judge

On November 2, 2004, for the second time in 48 months, George W. Bush and his minions illegally altered the Presidential election results by enough of a count that he will again illegally occupy the White House for another four years.
How did this happen? Due to the new machinery purchased under the "Help America Vote Act," at least 29% of the American electorate had their vote counted on equipment that is tamper-friendly and that leaves no auditable paper trail. According to some observers, that statistic is shy of the actual reality-they say sixty to sixty-one million votes were counted on such machinery. This would mean that more than HALF the vote was counted by defective machinery.

A great wailing and gnashing of teeth was heard from half the country, while jubilant cheers rose from the other half. At least from the 60% of American citizens who actually voted in the Word Series of Politics.
Forty percent chose not to take part in choosing the Commander in Chief of the mightiest military force the world has ever known. Not to take part in choosing the Leader of the Free World. Not to take part in choosing the President of the Untied States. Those were the truly undecided ones and no exit poll was done for them.

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

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

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

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

This is a brilliant analysis of why Kerry lost the US 2004 Presidential election by Evan Peterson, so long as the reader accepts the conventional explanations - that it was a fair election without fraud. Peterson gives many reasons for Kerry's loss, and lower than expected vote, and raises many questions about the Peters campaign and motivations. He does not raise the question of fraud in his article because he wants the reader to consider the deficiencies in the candidate and his organisation, rather than excuse them because of Bush's alleged fraud.

Why The DLC's Candidate, John Kerry, Was A Bad Choice For Democrats
One should avoid drawing simplistic conclusions in the wake of an extraordinarily complex national election with so many independent variables. Nevertheless, the Democratic Party needs to recognized that it has been compulsively displaying a pattern of self-defeating behavior, as in "Oops -- we did it again!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have examined this site and found lots of documentation of US election fraud and many links that yield further and related information. There are very serious implications here for the future destiny of America and the world.
The Scoop site is excellent. - Larry Ross

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

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

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

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

In my research I came across this extraordinary documentation of the laws enacted over the years in the US, that curtail, discourage or punish dissent or protest against the official line. It seems quite clear that America is forfeiting it's reputation as home of the brave and the free, and becoming more of a theocratic dynasty or plutocracy. Or a Fascist state - American style.

"The Neoconservative Plan for Global Dominance" and "Homeland Security Threatens Civil Liberty" are listed as Project Censored's most underreported stories for 2002-2003. The New York Times runs an editorial on black box voting, drawing widespread attention to the possibility of rigged elections in 2004.
Given our recent history, if freedom were to be undermined, how would we know for sure?

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

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

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

The story about the election fraud simply won't go away. More and more evidence is mounting, and recounts are now underway.
University professors and statistical experts have released a study that shows something went wrong with Florida's electronic voting machines. They call for investigation. On the Steal Your Election website you can read an article from Computer World about it and you can download the actual study.

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

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

Judging from the proliferation of articles on the Internet and elsewhere - some of them scholarly, some not - over whether there was something funny in the counting of ballots Nov. 2, an investigation needs to be launched if only to assure Americans that our election process isn't crooked.
The latest paper to cast doubt on the ballot count has been written by Dr. Steven F. Freeman, a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, who explored the strange discrepancy that occurred this year between exit polls and the actual count in the so-called battleground states.

Evan Peters election analysis makes many excellent points. But it does not cover election fraud which many articles in this website indicate did happen. I think election fraud colours the whole picture. It means Bush and the Republicans committed major crimes in order to steal the US Presidency - again. It also means that most people in the rest of the world have misjudged the American people, a majority of whom did not vote for Bush. They were not been fooled by Bush and the US media. Kerry did win and I think the rest of the world should recognise that and do what we can to help Americans reclaim their country. Read some of these articles and tell me if you think I'm wrong.

Bush did not win the election -- HE STOLE IT--
Hello John Kerry supporters!
  You have worked  tirelessly for over a year to elect John Kerry and other Democratic candidates. 
You've donated money, phone banked, registered voters, wrote letters to the editor, put up lawn signs, knocked on doors and monitored polls. You were there when they needed you.  They still need you, perhaps now more than ever.
  But more, your Democracy needs you.

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

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

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

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

The Power of Nightmares assesses whether the threat from a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion. In the concluding part of the series, the programme explains how the illusion was created and who benefits from it.

The cold war is over, but the much heralded "peace dividend" failed to materialise. The US has over 700 overseas military bases. The number is expanding as it's plans for global domination continue to be implemented. Henoko Bay is one more step.
In place of the communist enemy, the US is using the "terrorist" threat, and making more terrorists every day as it devastates Iraq. The so-called "terrorist threat" and 9/11 attack conspiracy did not exist in Iraq. The real Washington conspirators knew this before they created a litany of lies to justify launching their phoney genocidal war against the non-existent threat from Iraq.

-- A number of Okinawan, Japanese and American groups have filed a lawsuit - Dugong v. Rumsfeld - in San Francisco's Federal District Court against the U.S. Department of Defense in order to stop the construction of the new base. For more information on the lawsuit and the environmental issues at stake in the construction of the air base, see: http://actionnetwork.org/campaign/dugong_aa
. . . .Those at the encampment vow to continue their struggle until they halt the base construction. Local women in their 80s say they will give their lives to stop the project.

George Monbiot, in speech to environmental journalists, gave a superlatively good analysis of media suppression of the truth and distortion of the material they do present. It explains why Bush did so well. Monbiot also illuminated the environmental crises and how they increasingly threaten life on earth, and why the media give it such limited or distorted coverage.

......... So let us picture a journalist who is interested in the environment, and who works for a newspaper run by a rich man with rich friends. Let's say she wants to write about climate change, and that she knows that much of it results from the carbon dioxide emissions produced by coal-fired power stations. Straight away she runs into a problem: the power stations are owned and run by members of the rich men's trade union. She has several options.......

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

The evidence that he did is very compelling. If you read the following article email me what you think.
He has already created a mountain of evidence that his Iraq war is a pre-planned fraud.
That makes him a war criminal. So far the mass media is hiding this. If he stole the election because Kerry was winning, there is a danger to him of exposure. He could be impeached and be tried.
We will soon see if the mass media decide to abandon their Bush/cheerleader role and tell the truth.
In my previous writings and in many articles received from the US, I wrote that one of the methods Bush might use to stay in power is programming the new voting machines to show he won.

When actress Susan Sarandon appeared on the Bill Maher show over the weekend, he asked her what is the biggest issue we face as a nation.   Her reply was "voter fraud."
The usually knowledgeable Maher had no idea what she was talking about. When he asked, she replied:
"Something BIG is about to happen."
What I'm about to tell you is going to be hard to swallow at first. But if you're like most of us, once you start looking at the evidence, you'll scrape yourself off the ceiling, put your eyeballs back in their sockets, and you'll try to figure out what to do.
So here it is.

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

In the 1992 presidential campaign, James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign advisor, rallied his supporters with the slogan, "It's the economy, stupid." In 2004, the rallying cry for the Republicans should have been, "It's the American people, stupid. "
And stupid we are!
Faced with issues that will affect this country for a generation or more (if we're lucky enough to survive), millions of Americans voted based on whom they would like to have over for a barbeque and who shares their moral values.
Bush and moral values is an oxymoron. And Bush and the millions of Americans who voted for him because he shares their moral values are just plain morons.
Now here is a brief commercial showing the “President of moral values” saluting his flock . http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1033.htm
If you think this “one-finger victory salute” was a benign prank, just ask yourself the following question: Could you imagine a true believer and man of values, like President Carter, acting in such a manner?

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

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

Dear friends,  
Below are links to a powerful documentary and several revealing articles reported by major news media exposing serious problems with electronic voting machines. This is followed by excerpts from an excellent article which explains core problems within the elections system.    
"Most of the machines, including all of Florida's, lack paper records that could be used to verify the electronic results in a recount". "Over 20 percent of the machines tested by observers around the country failed to record votes properly."
http://www.wanttoknow.info/

Gives Bush Thousands Of Extra Votes
Once again, Tuesday's national election revealed the basic problem with e-voting machines.  In a nutshell, their are prone to errors -- whether through intentional programming or accidental malfunctions -- that can be undetectable.
[1]  For instance, the e-voting precinct of Gahanna in suburban Columbus, Ohio, recorded about seven times more votes for Mr. Bush than there were actual votes cast in the entire precinct! 
Fortunately, this error was so grossly in Mr. Bush's favor that it was noticed by voters in that precinct when they saw Gahanna's impossible vote totals on television, thus prompting corrective telephone calls to their registrar's office.  However, we don't know how many more e-voting "errors" have resulted in the misallocation of votes in Mr. Bush's favor, but have gone undetected. 

I struggled for some time with the title of this article. I might also have called it “Way Worse Than ‘I Told You So’” after having written for months, even years, that the charade we have just witnessed, called an election, would be a repeat performance of the coup d'etat of 2000. Was this election stolen? Unquestionably. The list of likely illegal acts in this election is no less than mindnumbing. But if you wish to read them, they can be found at: http://www.accuracy.org/new.htm

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

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

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

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

The hot story in the Blogosphere is that the "erroneous" exit polls that showed Kerry carrying Florida and Ohio (among other states) weren't erroneous at all - it was the numbers produced by paperless voting machines that were wrong, and Kerry actually won. As more and more analysis is done of what may (or may not) be the most massive election fraud in the history of the world, however, it's critical that we keep the largest issue at the forefront at all time: Why are We The People allowing private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their officers and boards of directors, and loyal only to agendas and politicians that will enhance their profitability, to handle our votes?

Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. In the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage” in election jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Drawing on what happened in Florida and studies of elections past, Palast argues that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots. So far there's no indication that Palast's hypothesis will be tested because only the provisional ballots are being counted.

Ohio State Senator Teresa Fedor said today: "There was trouble with our elections in Ohio at every stage. It's been a battle getting people registered to vote, getting to the ballot on voting day and getting that vote to count. There is a pattern of voter suppression; that's why I called for [Ohio Secretary of State] Blackwell's resignation more than a month ago. Blackwell, while claiming to run an unbiased elections process, was also the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. Additionally, he was the spokesperson for the anti-business, anti-family constitutional amendment 'Issue 1,' and a failed initiative to repeal a crucial sales-tax revenue source for the state. Blackwell learned his moves from the Katherine Harris playbook of Florida 2000, and we won't stand for it."

One of the US Army's top procurement officers yesterday called the Bush administration's grant of multibillion-dollar contracts to oil services giant Halliburton "the worst case of contracting abuse she has ever seen".      Belfast Telegraph
See also FBI Investigates Halliburton's No-Bid Contracts

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Power of Nightmares assesses whether the threat from a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion. In the concluding part of the series, the programme explains how the illusion was created and who benefits from it.

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

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

Students say they were conned into registering twice
An Observer investigation in the United States has uncovered widespread allegations of electoral abuse, many of them going uninvestigated despite complaints of what would appear to be criminal attempts to manipulate voter lists.
The allegations, which come just two days before Americans go to the polls in one of the most tightly contested elections in a generation, threaten to plunge Tuesday's count into a legal minefield and overshadow even the elections of 2000.
The claims come as both Republicans and Democrats put in place up to 2,000 lawyers across the country to challenge attempts to manipulate the vote in swing states.

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

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

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

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

Revelations contained in last months final report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction should make every American shudder in shame.
According to this report, written by Charles Duelfer, Saddam Hussein's regime destroyed their entire stockpile of WMD and their prohibited missiles over a decade ago.

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

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

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

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

About 100,000 Iraqi civilians - half of them women and children - have died in Iraq since the invasion, mostly as a result of airstrikes by coalition forces, according to the first reliable study of the death toll from Iraqi and US public health experts.
[Bin Laden killed almost 3,000 people and its terrorism. We kill 100,000 and its Democracy? ]

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

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

One of the US Army's top procurement officers yesterday called the Bush administration's grant of multibillion-dollar contracts to oil services giant Halliburton "the worst case of contracting abuse she has ever seen".      Belfast Telegraph

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

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

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

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

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

"Take Back America 2004"
A confidential disclosure from within the Kerry campaign confirmed a rumor Monday that Ralph Nader will "have an open welcome at the White House" when Kerry is elected. The rumor hit the internet when one of Fox News network's infamous "daily bulletins" warned its affiliates this past week to give no credibility to a "dangerous rumor" of a possible Kerry-Nader alliance.
See also here:
Bush relatives for Kerry: Blood Thicker than Oil! - 6 second cousins protest policies
'Clearly, Emperor has No Clothes'

I shall cast my vote for John Kerry come Nov 2.
I have been, and will continue to be, a Republican. But when we as a party send the wrong person to the White House, then it is our responsibility to send him home if our nation suffers as a result of his actions. I fall in the category of good conservative thinkers, like George F. Will, for instance, who wrote: "This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and having thought, to have second thoughts."

Noam Chomsky and Professor Francis Boyle, an international lawyer, both agree that "if Bush decides it is necessary to go to war in order to win in November, he will go to war" with Iran, Syria or North Korea. In my writings I have predicted the same thing.

....there is now considerable writing that the US will authorize an Israeli attack on the Iranian nuclear reactor at Bushehr. Also, the US will now be engaging in major naval maneuvers right off the coast of North Korea in late October. So Syria, Iran, and North Korea--the last two  part of the "axis of evil", along with Iraq. I stand by my conclusion, which Chomsky agrees with, that if Bush decides it is necessary to go to war in order to win in November, he will go to war.

The absolute last straw for me took place at the Bush rally, held in Central Point, Oregon on October 14th. President Bush stayed in Jacksonville, Oregon overnight after the rally, and protesters and police clashed on the streets. I sent out a photo of a Jackson County Sheriff's Deputy, all Nazi'd up in black leather riot control gear and grinning evilly as he shoved a woman holding her 5 year-old daughter. It wasn't the finest hour for local law enforcement, but even that wasn't the last straw for me. No, the last straw for me happened just before the Bush rally itself.

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

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

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

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

Hey American Media, What about following up on that mystery bulge:
Sometimes the smallest events have large implications. And sometimes things are, with mathematical certainty, exactly what they appear to be. Knowing this, a European friend sent me a story that's spread worldwide because it could be "Exhibit A" in the American electorate's search for a trustworthy president: "Bush's Mystery Bulge: The Rumor Is Flying Around The Globe - Was Bush Wired During The First Debate?"

The world approaches what is arguably the most crucial "election" in the history of humankind, one which will decide the direction of America's immense military and nuclear arsenal, as well as the ideals of the European colonial (ie. Roman) "Republican" political agenda. Some find in the Bush regime a frightening premonition of Hitler's Third Reich, but being brutally honest-- the Bush regime is more dangerous in the extreme.
While the Third Reich perfected political propaganda, their ends always justifying horrific means, keep in mind they didn't have a global television network, 24 hour right-wing smear-mongers, or billionaires like Rupert Murdoch pounding their message into millions of minds-- they had newsreels and posters. While Hitler had at his disposal a vast military force, with ruthless special forces and death camps, he didn't have a global satellite survelliance network, a nuclear arsenal capable of incinerating entire countries, stealth bombers, aircraft carriers, or Trident submarines. If he had, we would all be living in a much more ruthless world, pledging allegiance to the superior white race.

A revealing ABC news article begins, "In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba." The article goes on to say that the plans, code-named Operation Northwoods, were approved in writing by the top US military chiefs. These plans even proposed that the US military secretly blow up an American ship and hijack US planes as a false pretext for war. Does this ring a bell? Don't miss this disturbing article.

Last Opportunity For Citizens' Revolt Against Paperless Touch-Screen Ballots
The 2004 US Presidential election has raised the specter of so many electoral problems that citizens groan when yet another one looms before them. But if it's real, and it's going to be there on November 2, it certainly makes sense to address it now, rather than after the election!

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

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

From Dr. Deagle:
I have a timely story to relay on warnings I received before 9/11.
The events of 911 have forever changed all Americans views of what it is to be a free citizen of a Western democracy. They must be re-evaluated as thousands of inconsistencies and contradictions make this Orwellian tale even more pressing, now that our calendars cross yet another 911 anniversary.

There are important issues that the following brilliant article; "The Triumph of Anything Goes" does not mention. These include Bush's neocon-inspired plans for more wars, and his new nuclear war doctrines. These license the US to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively, against both nuclear and non-nuclear states, if the US decides that state to be a threat to the US or its allies. As part of the Bush conspiracy, the US and UK declared Iraq was part of the 9/11 terrorist attack, had various WMD including nuclear weapons, and could attack the US and "UK in 45 minutes". All were found to be lies. The US and UK , having created these huge lies to persuade their governments and public's to accept and support the phoney war, then attacked Iraq and murdered thousands of civilians.

  We all know that George W. Bush's reelection would probably bring about more illiberal policies regarding social justice, education, the arts, economic fairness, environmental protection, consumer rights, racial equality, foreign policy, civil liberties, and workers' rights. Less obvious, but perhaps as consequential over the long term, is how a Bush victory in November would change the fundamental practice of democracy in Washington. If the public were to award Bush a vote of confidence on the basis of his first-term record, it would amount to a ratification of the ruthless style and philosophy that have underpinned Bush's presidency--what Barack Obama at the Democratic Convention called "the politics of anything goes."

In war, you deny information, spread lies and use psychological warfare. An expert on military information operations explains how Bush has mastered this technique -- and used it against the American people.
On Thursday, Iraq's interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, will speak before a joint meeting of Congress, and from what he said in London on his way to the United States, it looks like Americans are going to be getting more of the strategic information operations that have been crucial to Bush's policy on Iraq from the beginning.

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

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

Seems like this whole line of investigation (which appeared at the Prison Planet site and soon in Mike ruppert's book) is getting traction. Here's a piece from the Axis of Logic site which, while hardly "mainstream" is not "underground" either. It starts with the Israeli spying scandal and leads to the subject line above: http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_11837.shtml

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

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

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

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

You can't buy this kind of publicity, even if you're George W. Bush and your campaign has raised more money than any other in U.S. history.
There he is on the homepage of the Southern Baptists' website, handing out "bags of ice and words of hope" on Wednesday to Floridians battered by Hurricane Frances. Whoops, there he is again on the homepage, in another photo, this time with Brother Jeb, putting ice and bottled water in another motorist's car. Oh, wait, there's a story too.

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

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

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

For almost three years since 9/11 independent researchers have stockpiled individual smoking guns which prove that the official version of events was not only a lie but operationally impossible.
However, no single smoking gun has yet been forwarded to explain why air defenses categorically reversed Standard Operating Procedure and failed to respond to hijacked jetliners.
Until now. More and more individuals are looking at the facts and highlighting exercise drills that took place on the morning of 9/11.    See:   http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september2004/080904wargamescover.htm

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

An FBI investigation into suspected security breaches involving Pentagon officials and Israel is unlikely to result in prosecution of senior figures following pressure from the White House, according to people familiar with the case.

In the case of World War II the Germans were controlled by a dictatorship and fed hate and fear propaganda, (see Hermann Goering's quotes below) to get them to go to war against what they were told were threatening enemies. They became the real threatening enemies to everyone so it was just and necessary for the West to oppose them with war. I think Twain's quote applies to the Nazis, but not to those defending themselves against the Nazis.

Dear Governor Schwarzenegger:
Please know that I'm one among many Californians who are deeply disappointed in your increasingly-boorish gubernatorial misbehavior, which at best lacks ethical integrity, and at worst cannot stand the light of further public crutiny without seriously tarnishing California's reputation. I will offer you two illustrative examples.

Karl Rove's Republicans swerve right on the way to the middle
It looked like Karl Rove was going to get away with it: presenting a nominating convention the press would call "moderate." The Times reported the opening morning how the "party seeks to pivot to the center." The first day's reviews depicted undeniable success, the Christian Science Monitor, for example, reporting on the Republicans, um, "pivot to the center." MSNBC put up an astonishingly Orwellian "Question of the Day" on its website: "Did Rudy Giuliani's speech reassure you or move you to support the Bush-Cheney ticket?" You could click either "Reassure" or "Move to support."

How Soon Will the U.S. or Israel Bomb Iran?

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

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

Current Polls Project A Razor-Thin Margin Of Victory For John Kerry, But The Razor's Edge Could Cut Either Way By November
According to professional pollsters, the American electorate is so highly polarized in 2004 that only 3% are still undecided "swing-voters."  So who's ahead in the presidential race?  The answer depends on the specificity of the polls.  In a three-man race between George Walker Bush, John Forbes Kerry, and Ralph Nader, the more generalized national polls currently show that Mr. Bush leads Mr. Kerry by an average of about +2%. [1]  Nevertheless, if the presidential election was held today, the more specific state polls currently project that Mr. Kerry would win by a slim margin of 270 to 259 in our often-berated, little-understood Electoral College.

Howard Dean, previous presidential contender, warned recently about potential voting machine fraud and that voters should demand a paper trail for each machine - otherwise fraud can occur and be undetected. I suspect that Bush & Co. will arrange with his voting machine friends for the disappearance of some Democratic votes, dropping, losing or not counting enough of the democratic votes in borderline states, that Bush will win and appear to be re-elected by popular vote.

Chavez Could Teach US Leaders a Thing or Two About Winning Votes
I knew that the administration of Hugo Chavez had won my heart when I met Olivia Delfino in one of the poor barrios in Caracas. As I was touring the neighborhood with an international delegation here to monitor this Sunday's referendum on Chavez, Olivia came out of her tiny house and grabbed my arm. "Tell the people of your country that we love Hugo Chavez," she insisted. She went on to tell me how her life had changed since he came to power. After living in the barrio for 40 years, she now had a formal title to her home. With that, she was able to get a bank loan to fix the roof so it wouldn't leak in the rain. Thanks to the Cuban dentists and a program called "Rescatando la sonrisa" - recovering the smile - for the first time in her life she was able to get her teeth fixed. And her daughter is in a job training program to become a nurse's assistant.

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

Last Clear Chance To Chase Down Electronic-Voting Before Its Security-Flaws Bring Down Our Electoral System There's really nothing new about terrorism-by-stealth, despite Mr. Bush's frequent protestations to the contrary. [1] Indeed, when the ancient Greeks feigned to sail away while the proud Trojans -- who'd resisted the Grecian siege for nine long years -- wheeled the Greeks' parting gift of a huge wooden horse inside their city's gates, the Trojans never stopped to consider terrorism-by-stealth, or that they'd be rudely awakened to discover too late that a lethal cargo of Greek guerrillas had been hidden inside its belly.

The last thing the United States needs in this part of the world is one more enemy. Yet last week, all indications were that the Bush administration was marching straight into a confrontation with Iran, the single largest demographic and military power in the Gulf region.

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

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

Terrorist Warnings Just Another Way Bush Will Steal Election
I'm probably one of thousands—maybe tens of thousands—who believe George W. Bush will do anything to retain control of the White House. It's not safe to have a healthy dose of skepticism like this these days. But this has to be said. I don't believe the country is going to be attacked by al-Qaeda anytime soon. I don't care how specific the so-called threat is. I don't care how many targets have been identified. I don't care how solid this new information is. I don't buy any of it. What I do believe is whenever Bush's approval ratings start slipping, the administration issues a terrorist warning saying an attack is imminent. Coincidence? I don't think so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Said by some to be more dangerous than Osama bin-Laden, he has been condemned as a "war maniac," called a "moron" by the Canadian prime minister’s chief spokeswoman, ridiculed as "The English Patient" for his struggles with language, and likened to Adolf Hitler.
Of all the labels hung on George W. Bush, the hardest to shake may be the comparison with Hitler.

Proposed by Larry Ross - NZ Editorial Commission Of Enquiry - To assess individual NZ newspaper's coverage of Iraq since 2,000 and decide what they got right and what they got wrong.
Based on George Monbiot's article and suggestions in "Our lies led us into war" in The Guardian on July 20, 2004 which follows. This proposal was sent to various newspapers, editors, journalists, journalist schools and others to promote the obligation of freedom of the press to publish facts, not propaganda or lies, and to periodically assess what they have published that they now find is wrong, and publish corrections or retractions. People are invited to forward this proposal to other potentially interested people and institutions.

Iran gave free passage to up to 10 of the September 11 hijackers just months before the 2001 attacks and offered to co-operate with al-Qa'eda against the US, an American report will say this week.
The all-party report by the 9/11 Commission, set up by Congress in 2002, will state that Iran, not Iraq, fostered relations with the al-Qa'eda network in the years leading up to the world's most devastating terrorist attack.

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

A myth equal to the fable of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is gaining strength on both sides of the Atlantic. It is that John Kerry offers a world-view different from that of George W Bush. Watch this big lie grow as Kerry is crowned the Democratic candidate and the "anyone but Bush" movement becomes a liberal cause celebre.

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

Hear ye, hear ye: Russia tells us Washington is its partner in the fight against international terrorism.
Tell that to Qatar, I say, where Russian agents were convicted last week of one brazen act of such terrorism.
Russian terror, directed at the people of Chechnya, did not begin in recent years, say, in 1994 when Russian troops entered the republic to quash its independence movement, and killed up to 100,000 people.

A US Army counterintelligence agent who accused fellow National Guardsmen of abusing Iraqi detainees says that his own commander coerced an Army psychiatrist into diagnosing him as "delusional." According to Sergeant Greg Ford, his commanding officer confronted psychiatrist Angelina Madera, a captain with the 30th Medical Support Element, after she had initially assessed Ford to be mentally stable.
Sgt. Ford says Captain Victor Artiga, the commander of the 223rd Military Intelligence Battalion, told Dr. Madera she was to reclassify the whistleblower Ford as unfit for duty so he could be transferred out of Iraq immediately.

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

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

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