Suicide bombing
“Many people worry that once a large number of suicide terrorists have acted that it is impossible to wind it down.”
“I have the first complete set of data on every al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from 1995 to early 2004, and they are not from some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world.   Two thirds are from the countries where the United States has stationed heavy combat troops since 1990.
Another point in this regard is Iraq itself.   Before our invasion, Iraq never had a suicide-terrorist attack in its history.   Never.
Since our invasion, suicide terrorism has been escalating rapidly with 20 attacks in 2003, 48 in 2004, and many more in the first five months of 2005.
Every year that the United States has stationed 150,000 combat troops in Iraq, suicide terrorism has doubled.    [This year the figure tripled or quadrupled]
Many people worry that once a large number of suicide terrorists have acted that it is impossible to wind it down.    The history of the last 20 years, however, shows the opposite.
Once the occupying forces withdraw from the homeland territory of the terrorists, they often stop — and often on a dime.
I think it depends not exclusively, but heavily, on how long our combat forces remain in the Persian Gulf.
The central motive for anti-American terrorism, suicide terrorism, and catastrophic terrorism is response to foreign occupation, the presence of our troops.
The longer our forces stay on the ground in the Arabian Peninsula, the greater the risk of the next 9/11, whether that is a suicide attack, a nuclear attack, or a biological attack.”
"We are not having any of this nonsense about it.   It's nothing to do with what the British are doing in Iraq or Afghanistan, or support for Israel, or support for America, or any of the rest of it.   It is nonsense, and we have got to confront it as that."
War Criminal Blair   July 26, 2005
The Logic of Suicide Terrorism:
It's the Occupation, Not the Fundamentalism
By Scott McConnell
The American Conservative
18 Juy 2005 Issue
Last month, Scott McConnell caught up with Associate Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, whose book on suicide terrorism, Dying to Win, is beginning to receive wide notice.   Pape has found that the most common American perceptions about who the terrorists are and what motivates them are off by a wide margin.
In his office is the world's largest database of information about suicide terrorists, rows and rows of manila folders containing articles and biographical snippets in dozens of languages compiled by Pape and teams of graduate students, a trove of data that has been sorted and analyzed and which underscores the great need for reappraising the Bush administration's current strategy.   Below are excerpts from a conversation with the man who knows more about suicide terrorists than any other American.
The American Conservative:  Your new book, Dying to Win, has a subtitle:  The Logic of Suicide Terrorism.   Can you just tell us generally on what the book is based, what kind of research went into it, and what your findings were?
Proud of what they do
Robert Pape:  Over the past two years, I have collected the first complete database of every suicide-terrorist attack around the world from 1980 to early 2004.   This research is conducted not only in English but also in native-language sources-Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, and Tamil, and others — so that we can gather information not only from newspapers but also from products from the terrorist community.
The terrorists are often quite proud of what they do in their local communities, and they produce albums and all kinds of other information that can be very helpful to understand suicide-terrorist attacks.
This wealth of information creates a new picture about what is motivating suicide terrorism.   Islamic fundamentalism is not as closely associated with suicide terrorism as many people think.   The world leader in suicide terrorism is a group that you may not be familiar with:  the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.
This is a Marxist group, a completely secular group that draws from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of the country.   They invented the famous suicide vest for their suicide assassination of Rajiv Ghandi in May 1991.   The Palestinians got the idea of the suicide vest from the Tamil Tigers.
TAC:  So if Islamic fundamentalism is not necessarily a key variable behind these groups, what is?
Drived by strategic objective:  Foreign occupation
RP:  The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective:  to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.   From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign — over 95 percent of all the incidents — has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.
TAC:  That would seem to run contrary to a view that one heard during the American election campaign, put forth by people who favor Bush's policy.   That is, we need to fight the terrorists over there, so we don't have to fight them here.
RP:  Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us.
It’s called genocide, slavery and colonization
This is war.
It is a war based on the ideology of might makes right to plunder planet and people.
The bad guys are the greedy, powerful men who have and have used the weapons of mass destruction and operate the means of mass distraction to divert the potentially dangerous thoughts and passions of oppressed and exploited vast majorities everywhere.
The good guys are those who fight back by all the means available to them.
They are fighting the eternal good fight against tyranny and oppression.
They reject your venomous version of democracy and freedom.
They do not want their societies to be greed-based.
They do not want mind-numbing sexually obsessed booty calls as the leitmotif of their culture.
They do not want addictive genetically-modified foods to poison their people.
They do not want to be sold into pharmaceutical slavery with Prozac so that they can become free to be you and me.
They do not want progressive politics that progresses towards the extinction of people and planet.
They do not want religions that justify invasion and occupation.
They do not want whole populations of greedophile pod-people moved into their countries under the guise of “Jewish right of return” or “aid” or reconstruction or redevelopment.
They have seen it all before — it’s called genocide, slavery and colonization.
Husayn Al-Kurdi and Dr. June Scorza Terpstra — IPS
War and Ideology
Civilian Death Toll in Iraq May Top 1 Million
September 14, 2007 by the Los Angeles Times
A British survey offers the highest estimate to date.
The figure from ORB, a British polling agency that has conducted several surveys in Iraq, followed statements this week from the U.S. military defending itself against accusations it was trying to play down Iraqi deaths to make its strategy appear successful.
Click link below for complete article
Estimated between 426,369 to 793,663 killed in Iraq since US Occupation
October 11, 2006
Since the 2003 American invasion, the figure breaks down to about 15,000 violent deaths a month.
The second study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health uses samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extimate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.
US occupation for oil raid
Baghdad  July, 2007
The new study is more representative, its researchers said, and the sampling is broader.
The study surveyed 1,849 Iraqi families in 47 different neighborhoods across Iraq with the selection of geographical areas in 18 regions across Iraq baseded on population size, not on the level of violence.
In the last week of September, the government barred the central morgue in Baghdad and the Health Ministry — the two main sources of information for civilian deaths — from releasing figures to the news media.
In October a note was issued from the government instructing officials not to release death totals to the UN.
The study uses a method similar to that employed in estimates of casualty figures in other conflict areas like Darfur and Congo.   It sought to measure the number of deaths that occurred as a result of the war.
The figure is not exhaustive.   A police official at Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad who spoke on the condition of anonymity said he had seen nationwide counts provided to the hospital that indicated as many as 200 people a day were dying.
“We found deaths all over the country,” Gilbert Burnham, the principle author of the study said.   Baghdad was an area of medium violence in the country, he said.   The provinces of Diyala and Salahuddin, north of Baghdad, and Anbar to the west, all had higher death rates than the capital.
       Civilian Death Toll in Iraq May Top 1 Million     
            —  ORB, a British polling agency, September 2007          
Iraq: the hidden cost of the war
Andrew Stephen
Published 12 March 2007
America won't simply be paying with its dead.
The Pentagon is trying to silence economists who predict that several decades of care for the wounded will amount to an unbelievable $2.5 trillion.
They roar in every day, usually direct from the Landstuhl US air-force base in the Rhineland: giant C-17 cargo planes capable of lifting and flying the 65-tonne M1 Abrams tank to battlefields anywhere in the world.
But Landstuhl is the first staging post for transporting most of the American wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan back to the United States, and these planes act as CCATs ("critical care air transport") with their AETs — "aeromedical evacuation teams" of doctors, nurses and medical technicians, whose task is to make sure that gravely wounded US troops arrive alive and fit enough for intensive treatment at the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre, just six miles up the road from me in Washington.
These days it is de rigueur for all politicians, ranging from President Bush and Ibrahim al-Jaafari (Iraq's previous "prime minister") to junior congressmen, to visit the 113-acre Walter Reed complex to pay tribute to the valour of horribly wounded soldiers.
Last Christmas, the centre was so overwhelmed by the 500,000 cards and presents it received for wounded soldiers that it announced it could accept no more.
Yet the story of the US wounded reveals yet another deception by the Bush administration, masking monumental miscalculations that will haunt generations to come.
Thanks to the work of a Harvard professor and former Clinton administration economist named Linda Bilmes, and some other hard-working academics, we have discovered that the administration has been putting out two entirely separate and conflicting sets of numbers of those wounded in the wars.
This might sound like chicanery by George W Bush and his cronies — or characteristic incompetence — but Bilmes and Professor Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist from Columbia University, have established not only that the number wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan is far higher than the Pentagon has been saying, but that looking after them alone could cost present and future US taxpayers a sum they estimate to be $536bn, but which could get considerably bigger still.
Just one soldier out of the 1.4 million troops so far deployed who has returned with a debilitating brain injury, for example, may need round-the-clock care for five, six, or even seven decades.
In present-day money, according to one study, care for that soldier alone will cost a minimum of $4.3m.
Article continued here: Iraq: the hidden cost of the war
© New Statesman 1913–2007
Demand driven by presence of foreign forces
Since 1990, the United States has stationed tens of thousands of ground troops on the Arabian Peninsula, and that is the main mobilization appeal of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
People who make the argument that it is a good thing to have them attacking us over there are missing that suicide terrorism is not a supply-limited phenomenon where there are just a few hundred around the world willing to do it because they are religious fanatics.
It is a demand-driven phenomenon.
That is, it is driven by the presence of foreign forces on the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.
The operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism a new lease on life.
TAC:  If we were to back up a little bit before the invasion of Iraq to what happened before 9/11, what was the nature of the agitprop that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were putting out to attract people?
RP:  Osama bin Laden's speeches and sermons run 40 and 50 pages long.
They begin by calling tremendous attention to the presence of tens of thousands of American combat forces on the Arabian Peninsula.
In 1996, he went on to say that there was a grand plan by the United States — that the Americans were going to use combat forces to conquer Iraq, break it into three pieces, give a piece of it to Israel so that Israel could enlarge its country, and then do the same thing to Saudi Arabia.
As you can see, we are fulfilling his prediction, which is of tremendous help in his mobilization appeals.
TAC:  The fact that we had troops stationed on the Arabian Peninsula was not a very live issue in American debate at all.   How many Saudis and other people in the Gulf were conscious of it?
RP:  We would like to think that if we could keep a low profile with our troops that it would be okay to station them in foreign countries.
The truth is, we did keep a fairly low profile.
We did try to keep them away from Saudi society in general, but the key issue with American troops is their actual combat power.
Tens of thousands of American combat troops, married with air power, is a tremendously powerful tool.
Evidence shows presence of American troops clearly pivotal factor driving suicide terrorism
Now, of course, today we have 150,000 troops on the Arabian Peninsula, and we are more in control of the Arabian Peninsula than ever before.
TAC:  If you were to break down causal factors, how much weight would you put on a cultural rejection of the West and how much weight on the presence of American troops on Muslim territory?
RP:  The evidence shows that the presence of American troops is clearly the pivotal factor driving suicide terrorism.
Blow to kingdom coming the local natives.
They start by invading, terrorizing native populations into submission.
Occupation of other people’s territories follows, including making laws and holding bogus elections that serve their plunder and profit purpose while they “legally” ethnically cleanse and blow to kingdom coming the local natives.
Human resources in the form of collaborators are identified and given a small piece of plunder pie to keep them diverted from the reality of their servitude to this ideology and their betrayal to all peoples with ideologies antithetical to their greed screed.
Using weapons of mass media, they convince people that this is normal, that they are the good guys.
Their ideology is that basic.
It has nothing to do with democracy or freedom.
Democracy means “rule of the people”, not “over the people”.
Husayn Al-Kurdi and Dr. June Scorza Terpstra — IPS
War and Ideology
If Islamic fundamentalism were the pivotal facto
If Islamic fundamentalism were the pivotal factor, then we should see some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world, like Iran, which has 70 million people — three times the population of Iraq and three times the population of Saudi Arabia — with some of the most active groups in suicide terrorism against the United States.
However, there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Iran, and we have no evidence that there are any suicide terrorists in Iraq from Iran.
Many people in Iraq believe bombing of mosque was US black budget operation
Sudan is a country of 21 million people.   Its government is extremely Islamic fundamentalist.
The ideology of Sudan was so congenial to Osama bin Laden that he spent three years in Sudan in the 1990s.
Yet there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Sudan.
I have the first complete set of data on every al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from 1995 to early 2004, and they are not from some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world.
Two thirds are from the countries where the United States has stationed heavy combat troops since 1990.
Another point in this regard is Iraq itself.
Before our invasion, Iraq never had a suicide-terrorist attack in its history.
Never.
Since our invasion, suicide terrorism has been escalating rapidly with 20 attacks in 2003, 48 in 2004, and over 50 in just the first five months of 2005.
Every year that the United States has stationed 150,000 combat troops in Iraq, suicide terrorism has doubled.
TAC:  So your assessment is that there are more suicide terrorists or potential suicide terrorists today than there were in March 2003?
Walk-in volunteers
RP:  I have collected demographic data from around the world on the 462 suicide terrorists since 1980 who completed the mission, actually killed themselves.
This information tells us that most are walk-in volunteers.
Very few are criminals.
Few are actually longtime members of a terrorist group.
For most suicide terrorists, their first experience with violence is their very own suicide-terrorist attack.
There is no evidence there were any suicide-terrorist organizations lying in wait in Iraq before our invasion.
What is happening is that the suicide terrorists have been produced by the invasion.
TAC:  Do we know who is committing suicide terrorism in Iraq?   Are they primarily Iraqis or walk-ins from other countries in the region?
RP:  Our best information at the moment is that the Iraqi suicide terrorists are coming from two groups — Iraqi Sunnis and Saudis — the two populations most vulnerable to transformation by the presence of large American combat troops on the Arabian Peninsula.
This is perfectly consistent with the strategic logic of suicide terrorism.
TAC:  Does al-Qaeda have the capacity to launch attacks on the United States, or are they too tied down in Iraq?   Or have they made a strategic decision not to attack the United States, and if so, why?
Many people in Iraq believe bombing of mosque was US black budget operation
RP:  Al-Qaeda appears to have made a deliberate decision not to attack the United States in the short term.
We know this not only from the pattern of their attacks but because we have an actual al-Qaeda planning document found by Norwegian intelligence.
The document says that al-Qaeda should not try to attack the continent of the United States in the short term but instead should focus its energies on hitting America's allies in order to try to split the coalition.
What the document then goes on to do is analyze whether they should hit Britain, Poland, or Spain.
It concludes that they should hit Spain just before the March 2004 elections because, and I am quoting almost verbatim:  Spain could not withstand two, maximum three, blows before withdrawing from the coalition, and then others would fall like dominoes.
That is exactly what happened.
Six months after the document was produced, al-Qaeda attacked Spain in Madrid.
That caused Spain to withdraw from the coalition.
Others have followed.
So al-Qaeda certainly has demonstrated the capacity to attack and in fact they have done over 15 suicide-terrorist attacks since 2002, more than all the years before 9/11 combined.   Al-Qaeda is not weaker now.   Al-Qaeda is stronger.
TAC:  What would constitute a victory in the War on Terror or at least an improvement in the American situation?
RP:  For us, victory means not sacrificing any of our vital interests while also not having Americans vulnerable to suicide-terrorist attacks.  
In the case of the Persian Gulf, that means we should pursue a strategy that secures our interest in oil but does not encourage the rise of a new generation of suicide terrorists.
In the 1970s and the 1980s, the United States secured its interest in oil without stationing a single combat soldier on the Arabian Peninsula.   Instead, we formed an alliance with Iraq and Saudi Arabia, which we can now do again.
We relied on numerous aircraft carriers off the coast of the Arabian Peninsula, and naval air power now is more effective not less.
We also built numerous military bases so that we could move large numbers of ground forces to the region quickly if a crisis emerged.
That strategy, called "offshore balancing," worked splendidly against Saddam Hussein in 1990 and is again our best strategy to secure our interest in oil while preventing the rise of more suicide terrorists.
TAC:  Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders also talked about the "Crusaders-Zionist alliance," and I wonder if that, even if we weren't in Iraq, would not foster suicide terrorism.   Even if the policy had helped bring about a Palestinian state, I don't think that would appease the more hardcore opponents of Israel.
RP:  I not only study the patterns of where suicide terrorism has occurred but also where it hasn't occurred.
Not every foreign occupation has produced suicide terrorism.
Why do some and not others?
Here is where religion matters, but not quite in the way most people think.
In virtually every instance where an occupation has produced a suicide-terrorist campaign, there has been a religious difference between the occupier and the occupied community.
That is true not only in places such as Lebanon and in Iraq today but also in Sri Lanka, where it is the Sinhala Buddhists who are having a dispute with the Hindu Tamils.
Many people in Iraq believe bombing of mosque was US black budget operation
When there is a religious difference between the occupier and the occupied, that enables terrorist leaders to demonize the occupier in especially vicious ways.
Now, that still requires the occupier to be there.
Absent the presence of foreign troops, Osama bin Laden could make his arguments but there wouldn't be much reality behind them.
The reason that it is so difficult for us to dispute those arguments is because we really do have tens of thousands of combat soldiers sitting on the Arabian Peninsula.
TAC:  Has the next generation of anti-American suicide terrorists already been created?   Is it too late to wind this down, even assuming your analysis is correct and we could de-occupy Iraq?
Stop — and often on a dime
RP:  Many people worry that once a large number of suicide terrorists have acted that it is impossible to wind it down.
The history of the last 20 years, however, shows the opposite.
Once the occupying forces withdraw from the homeland territory of the terrorists, they often stop — and often on a dime.
In Lebanon, for instance, there were 41 suicide-terrorist attacks from 1982 to 1986, and after the U.S. withdrew its forces, France withdrew its forces, and then Israel withdrew to just that six-mile buffer zone of Lebanon, they virtually ceased.   They didn't completely stop, but there was no campaign of suicide terrorism.   Once Israel withdrew from the vast bulk of Lebanese territory, the suicide terrorists did not follow Israel to Tel Aviv.
This is also the pattern of the second Intifada with the Palestinians.
As Israel is at least promising to withdraw from Palestinian-controlled territory (in addition to some other factors), there has been a decline of that ferocious suicide-terrorist campaign.
This is just more evidence that withdrawal of military forces really does diminish the ability of the terrorist leaders to recruit more suicide terrorists.
That doesn't mean that the existing suicide terrorists will not want to keep going.
I am not saying that Osama bin Laden would turn over a new leaf and suddenly vote for George Bush.
There will be a tiny number of people who are still committed to the cause, but the real issue is not whether Osama bin Laden exists.   It is whether anybody listens to him.
That is what needs to come to an end for Americans to be safe from suicide terrorism.
TAC:  There have been many kinds of non-Islamic suicide terrorists, but have there been Christian suicide terrorists?
RP:  Not from Christian groups per se, but in Lebanon in the 1980s, of those suicide attackers, only eight were Islamic fundamentalists.   Twenty-seven were Communists and Socialists.   Three were Christians.
TAC:  Has the IRA used suicide terrorism?
RP:  The IRA did not.   There were IRA members willing to commit suicide — the famous hunger strike was in 1981.
What is missing in the IRA case is not the willingness to commit suicide, to kill themselves, but the lack of a suicide-terrorist attack where they try to kill others.
       Basra, Fallujah, Baghdad, Mosul...      
       US created Iraq — devastated cities       
       They are such liars     

Ludicrous Diversion - 7/7 London Bombings Documentary

On the 7th of July 2005 London was hit by a series of explosions.
There were calls for an impartial inquiry which have been rejected by the British Labour govenment.
Tony Blair described such an inquiry as a ‘ludicrous diversion’.
What don’t they want us to find out?
You probably think you know what happened that day.
But you don’t.
       Ludicrous Diversion - 7/7 London Bombings Documentary      
       Click here     
       Last time we checked this was still allowed     
Motto is plunder and profit uber alles
Their road map includes capitalism as the economic mechanism to world domination.
Christian Zionism as their religious justification.
Their sociology centered around an all-things-sexualized consumption.
And, racism as a fundamental tactic to accomplish their greed goals.
They claim that they are bringing civilization to others.
Their motto is plunder and profit uber alles, with the historic modus operandi of “kill the natives and steal the land.”
Husayn Al-Kurdi and Dr. June Scorza Terpstra — IPS
War and Ideology
Negotiations
If you look at the pattern of violence in the IRA, almost all of the killing is front-loaded to the 1970s and then trails off rather dramatically as you get through the mid-1980s through the 1990s.
Abandoned
building
US Terror State
60% of
Iraq males
unemployed
There is a good reason for that, which is that the British government, starting in the mid-1980s, began to make numerous concessions to the IRA on the basis of its ordinary violence.
In fact, there were secret negotiations in the 1980s, which then led to public negotiations, which then led to the Good Friday Accords.
If you look at the pattern of the IRA, this is a case where they actually got virtually everything that they wanted through ordinary violence.
Purpose of suicide-terrorist attack is not to die
The purpose of a suicide-terrorist attack is not to die.
It is the kill, to inflict the maximum number of casualties on the target society in order to compel that target society to put pressure on its government to change policy.
If the government is already changing policy, then the whole point of suicide terrorism, at least the way it has been used for the last 25 years, doesn't come up.
TAC:  Are you aware of any different strategic decision made by al-Qaeda to change from attacking American troops or ships stationed at or near the Gulf to attacking American civilians in the United States?
RP:  I wish I could say yes because that would then make the people reading this a lot more comfortable.
The fact is not only in the case of al-Qaeda, but in suicide-terrorist campaigns in general, we don't see much evidence that suicide-terrorist groups adhere to a norm of attacking military targets in some circumstances and civilians in others.
In fact, we often see that suicide-terrorist groups routinely attack both civilian and military targets, and often the military targets are off-duty policemen who are unsuspecting.
They are not really prepared for battle.
The reasons for the target selection of suicide terrorists appear to be much more based on operational rather than normative criteria.
They appear to be looking for the targets where they can maximize the number of casualties.
One soldier dead
Five wounded
60% of Iraq males unemployed
In the case of the West Bank, for instance, there is a pattern where Hamas and Islamic Jihad use ordinary guerrilla attacks, not suicide attacks, mainly to attack settlers.
They use suicide attacks to penetrate into Israel proper.
Over 75 percent of all the suicide attacks in the second Intifada were against Israel proper and only 25 percent on the West Bank itself.
TAC:  What do you think the chances are of a weapon of mass destruction being used in an American city?
RP:  I think it depends not exclusively, but heavily, on how long our combat forces remain in the Persian Gulf.
The central motive for anti-American terrorism, suicide terrorism, and catastrophic terrorism is response to foreign occupation, the presence of our troops.
The longer our forces stay on the ground in the Arabian Peninsula, the greater the risk of the next 9/11, whether that is a suicide attack, a nuclear attack, or a biological attack
Invade, kill, destroy, occupy and dominate
The London bombings have brought about a renewed round by the imperial media hand puppets of the claim that their terrifying wars to rule the world are ideology wars.
They contrast their spread of democracy and freedom with the necessarily evil intentions of those who resist them.
They are right in one thing.
It is one war, as heads of both the CIA and Mossad have confirmed.
They both refer to it accurately as WWIV.
It is the ideology of sanctified and self-righteous greed manifesting itself in the present version of crusader conquest strategies against the people of the world.
In fact, the job of the media is to be the deceiver par excellance, the direct opposite of what it purports to be.
Their job is to prettify and glorify what their masters do.
Which is invade, kill, destroy, occupy and dominate.
Husayn Al-Kurdi and Dr. June Scorza Terpstra — IPS
War and Ideology
Lest We Forget
These Were Blair's Bombs
By John Pilger
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Sunday 10 July 2005
In all the coverage of last week's bombing of London, a basic truth is struggling to be heard.
Raid on
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US Terror State
60% of
Iraq
males
unemployed
It is this:  no one doubts the atrocious inhumanity of those who planted the bombs, but no one should also doubt that this has been coming since the day Tony Blair joined George Bush in their bloody invasion and occupation of Iraq.
They are "Blair's bombs", and he ought not be allowed to evade culpability with yet another unctuous speech about "our way of life", which his own rapacious violence in other countries has despoiled.
Indeed, the only reliable warning from British intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq was that which predicted a sharp increase in terrorism "with Britain and Britons a target".
A House of Commons committee has since verified this warning.
Had Blair heeded it instead of conspiring to deceive the nation that Iraq offered a threat the Londoners who died on Thursday might be alive today, along with tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis.
Focal point of terrorism
Three weeks ago, a classified CIA report revealed that the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq had turned that country into a focal point of terrorism.
None of the intelligence agencies regarded Iraq as such a flashpoint before the invasion, however tyrannical the regime.
On the contrary, in 2003, the CIA reported that Iraq "exported no terrorist threat to his neighbours" and that Saddam Hussein was "implacably hostile to Al-Qaeda".
Blair's and Bush's invasion changed all that.
In invading a stricken and defenceless country at the heart of the Islamic and Arab world, their adventure became self-fulfilling; Blair's epic irresponsibility has brought the daily horrors of Iraq home to Britain.
For more than a year, he has urged the British to "move on" from Iraq, and last week it seemed that his spinmeisters and good fortune had joined hands.
The awarding of the 2012 Olympics to London created the fleeting illusion that all was well, regardless of messy events in a faraway country.
Moreover, the G8 meeting in Scotland and its accompanying "Make Poverty History" campaign and circus of celebrities served as a temporary cover for what is arguably the greatest political scandal of modern times:  an illegal, brutal and craven invasion conceived in lies and which, under the system of international law established at Nuremberg, represented a "paramount war crime".
Raid on houses al-Thobat
US Terror State
60% of Iraq males unemployed
World Tribunal on Iraq
Over the past two weeks, the contrast between the coverage of the G8, its marches and pop concerts, and another "global" event has been striking.
The World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul has had virtually no coverage, yet the evidence it has produced, the most damning to date, has been the silent spectre at the Geldoff extravaganzas.
The tribunal is a serious international public inquiry into the invasion and occupation, the kind governments dare not hold.
Its expert, eyewitness testimonies, said the author Arundathi Roy, a tribunal jury member, "demonstrate that even those of us who have tried to follow the war closely are not aware of a fraction of the horrors that have been unleashed in Iraq."
The most shocking was given by Dahr Jamail, one of the best un-embedded reporters working in Iraq.
He described how the hospitals of besieged Fallujah had been subjected to an American tactic of collective punishment, with US marines assaulting staff and stopping the wounded entering, and American snipers firing at the doors and windows, and medicines and emergency blood prevented from reaching them.
Children, the elderly, were shot dead in front of their families, in cold blood.
Imagine for a moment the same appalling state of affairs imposed on the London hospitals that received the victims of Thursday's bombing.
Unimaginable?   Well, it happens, in our name, regardless of whether the BBC reports it, which is rare.
When will someone ask about this at one of the staged "press conferences" at which Blair is allowed to emote for the cameras stuff about "our values outlast [ing] theirs"?   Silence is not journalism.
In Fallujah, they know "our values" only too well.
While the two men responsible for the carnage in Iraq, Bush and Blair, were side by side at Gleneagles, why wasn't the connection of their fraudulent "war on terror" made with the bombing in London?
And when will someone in the political class say that Blair's smoke-and-mirrors "debt cancellation" at best amounts to less than the money the government spent in a week brutalising Iraq, where British and American violence is the cause of the doubling of child poverty and malnutrition since Saddam Hussein was overthrown (Unicef).
The truth is that the debt relief the G8 is offering is lethal because its ruthless "conditionalities" of captive economies far outweigh any tenuous benefit.
This was taboo during the G8 week, whose theme was not so much making poverty history as the silencing and pacifying and co-opting dissent and truth.
Holds
Koran
Raid on
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60% of
Iraq
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The mawkish images on giant screens behind the pop stars in Hyde Park included no pictures of murdered Iraqi doctors with the blood streaming from their heads, cut down by Bush's snipers.   Real life became more satirical than satire could ever be.
There was Bob Geldoff on the front pages resting his smiling face on smiling Blair's shoulder, the war criminal and his knighted jester.
Saviours of the world's poor
There was an heroically silhouetted Bono, who celebrates men like Jeffrey Sachs as saviours of the world's poor while lauding "compassionate" George Bush's "war on terror" as one of his generation's greatest achievements; and there was Paul Wolfowitz, beaming and promising to make poverty history:  this is the man who, before he was handed control of the World Bank, was an apologist for Suharto's genocidal regime in Indonesia, who was one of the architects of Bush's "neo-con" putsch and of the bloodfest in Iraq and the notion of "endless war".
For the politicians and pop stars and church leaders and polite people who believed Blair and Gordon Brown when they declared their "great moral crusade" against poverty, Iraq was an embarrassment.
The killing of more than 100,000 Iraqis mostly by American gunfire and bombs — a figure reported in a comprehensive peer-reviewed study in The Lancet — was airbrushed from mainstream debate.
In our free societies, the unmentionable is that "the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people", as Arthur Miller once wrote, "and so the evidence has to be internally denied."
Not only denied, but distracted by an entire court:   Geldoff, Bono, Madonna, McCartney et al, whose "Live 8" was the very antithesis of 15 February 2003 when two million people brought their hearts and brains and anger to the streets of London.
Blair will almost certainly use last week's atrocity and tragedy to further deplete basic human rights in Britain, as Bush has done in America.
The goal is not security, but greater control.
Above all this, the memory of their victims, "our" victims, in Iraq demands the return of our anger.
And nothing less is owed to those who died and suffered in London last week, unnecessarily.
The Zoo Translator
What Blair said:
"It is a sad day for the British people, but we will hold true to the British way of life."		What Blair meant:
"It is a very said day for the British people.   But it might save my ID card scheme.   I can do a moving speech in front of the world, where I can pause dramatically between words for theatrical effect, like a public school Christopher Walkin.   Also I can push through some more terror legislation, then justify the war in Iraq even more by saying the world's a safer place."
       Zoo   15-21 July, 2005       
The US definitions of terrorism become more problematic when we use them to judge the conduct of successive US government.
The United States has frequently employed violent actions against civilians ­ at home and abroad ­ which under its own definitions would have to be described as terrorism. [3]
Indeed, in an objective evaluation of global terrorism over the past two centuries, a panel of the world's leading ethicists might well conclude that the United States easily belongs in the category of the worst offenders.
Of course, Germany, Britain, France, Spain, Belgium, Italy, the Soviet Union, and Japan would also be jostling for the top positions on this list.
Tokyo
Protesting Japanese military occupation of Iraq
If Iraq under Saddam appeared on this list at all, it might just win a place very close to the bottom.
Are there any lessons hidden in all of this?
Two easily come to mind.
First, no country that lives in a glass house should throw rocks at others.
Second, if some angry folks lob a few rocks at you, shattering a few windowpanes, then, before you get too worked up, begin by taking an inventory of the damage you have done over the years to all the houses in your neighborhood.
That would be an appropriate response, instead of pleading virtue and starting to throw rocks at all the houses you covet for their location and treasures.
However, when lessons come cheap no one learns anything.
The powerful never learned a lesson as long as they could teach others a lesson or two.
So, it appears that rocks will be lobbed back and forth until one party or the other, or both, have learned a lesson or two.
Till then, the rest of us have to try if we can to lie low and protect our heads from irreparable damage.
And while we keep our heads try to put some sense into the heads of those who are busy lobbing rocks all around us.
Video taken from Sky News, placed on YouTube:

Galloway wipes the floor with Sky News anchor

       Galloway on Israel and lebanon      
       Click here     
       Last time we checked this was still allowed     
Sky News anchor: Joining me now is a man who’s not known for sitting on the fence.   He passionately opposed the invasion of Iraq and now he feels that Hizbullah is justified in attacking Israel.   The Respect MP for Bethnel Green is in our London studio.   A very good evening, uh good morning to you Mr. Galloway.   How do you JUSTIFY your support for Hizbullah and its leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah?
She might as well have punched him in the face and handed him a gun.
London bombing not remotely unpredictable
From Hansard ­ House of Commons, 7th July , 4.29 P.M. hon. Member George Galloway.
The Bishop of Stepney Rt Rev Stephen Oliver, front third left, and George Galloway MP, front third right, and other religious leaders take part in a prayer for peace during a vigil near Aldgate Station in central London, Friday July 8, 2005.
Mr. George Galloway: The hon. Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice) said that it is a funny old world, and that is certainly true with regard to the issue that he raised.
I am, I think, a longer-serving Member of this House than he is, and I remember when the Labour Benches were littered with members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.   Indeed, Members who wear different badges today used then to sport daily the badges of CND.
Mr. Kevan Jones: Some of them are in the Cabinet.
Mr. Galloway: Indeed; the Cabinet is full of them.
That was a time when Britain was facing a Soviet Union and an eastern Europe bristling with thousands upon thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles, all aimed at us.
Now that there is no such adversary, those same Members have swapped their badges.
I have no doubt that they will comprehensively vote down the motion tabled by the hon. Member for Pendle at the parliamentary Labour party meeting.   As he is a gentle soul, I fear for his safety on that occasion if the reports I hear of the PLP are anything like accurate.
I have been sitting through the debate feeling not that it is a funny old world but that it is another world.
The sort of complacent consensus that has crept by osmosis through the Chamber as the hours have passed is so utterly different from, and in contradiction to, the attitude outside in the country and around the world that I became more persuaded than ever that the House of Commons is out of touch with reality.
Little knowledge is dangerous
I am sorry that the hon. Member for Gosport (Peter Viggers) is no longer in his place.
He may well be an expert on defence procurement matters but, in his mini discourse on Islam, he reminded us of the universal truth that a little knowledge is dangerous.
Iraq women line up at the offices of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to add their name to a petition calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq during a signature collection Saturday, July 9, 2005. Sadr's office collected one million signatures calling for the end of the American presence in Iraq. Photo: Karim Kadim
Iraqi women line up at the offices of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to add their name to a petition calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq during a signature collection Saturday, July 9, 2005.
Sadr's office collected one million signatures calling for the end of the American presence in Iraq.
His "Reader's Digest" analysis of Islam and the people of the Muslim world — more than 1,000 million strong — illustrated the chasm between the east and the powerful here in the west.
At least one, perhaps two of the explosions this morning took place in my constituency.
Many of those caught up in the events were my constituents, heading to work in the City and the west end.
I spent four hours or so this morning at the Royal London hospital in my constituency where the medical staff are toiling, without a break, to deal with the casualties who are being brought in in their scores-perhaps, by now, in their hundreds.
Fire engines taken away as economy measure
I walked among the emergency workers, including the fire brigade staff, in the very stations that have in the past few weeks had fire engines taken away from them as economy measures.
I refer to the fire station at Bethnal Green in my constituency and the fire station in the King's Cross-Euston area — the two places where the fire services are stretched almost to breaking point in dealing with the consequences of this morning's events.
The people of the east end and the emergency workers are going about their business calmly and stoically in the way for which our country is famous.
I condemn the act that was committed this morning.   I have no need to speculate about its authorship.   It is absolutely clear that Islamist extremists, inspired by the al-Qaeda world outlook, are responsible.
I condemn it utterly as a despicable act, committed against working people on their way to work, without warning, on tubes and buses.   Let there be no equivocation: the primary responsibility for this morning's bloodshed lies with the perpetrators of those acts.
Did not come out of a clear blue sky
However, it would be crass to do other than what the Secretary of State for Defence in a way invited us to do.
We cannot separate the acts from the political backdrop.
They did not come out of a clear blue sky, any more than those monstrous mosquitoes that struck the twin towers and other buildings in the United States on 9/11 2001.
The Defence Secretary said that we must look at the causal circumstances behind the problems of security and defence in the world.   I insist that we do so.
If Members examine our debate tomorrow in the cold light of day they will discover a self-evident truth: many Members of Parliament find it easy to feel empathy with people killed in explosions by razor-sharp red-hot steel and splintering flying glass when they are in London, but they can blank out of their mind entirely the fact that a person killed in exactly the same way in Falluja died exactly the same death.
US Army soldiers guarding detained suspects somewhere in Baghdad during Operation Muthanna Strike. Photo: AFP/US Army
US occupation soldiers guarding detained suspected Iraq resistance fighters somewhere in Baghdad during Operation Muthanna Strike.
Falluja, city size of Coventry
When the US armed forces, their backs guarded, as a result of a decision by our politicians, by our armed forces, systematically reduced Falluja, a city the size of Coventry, brick by brick and killed an unknown number of people —probably the number runs to thousands, if not tens of thousands — not a whisper found its way into the Chamber.
I have grown used to that.
I know that for many people in the House and in power in this country the blood of some people is worth more than the blood of others.
Mike Penning (Hemel Hempstead) (Con): Will the hon. Gentleman clarify a whisper that has come to the House?    Did he say elsewhere today that Londoners had this coming?    Is it true that he said that?
Mr. Galloway: That is a despicable smear.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Sylvia Heal): Order.   I remind all hon. Members that we are debating the fourth report of the Defence Committee.
Mr. Galloway: The Minister of State says from a sedentary position that it is more or less right.   I take it that that means that it is not right.   I have never uttered any such words.   The words that I am speaking now are my words.   If the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning) would care to listen, he can disagree with me, but he should not attempt to put into my mouth words that I have never spoken.   Madam Deputy Speaker, I ask for your protection.   [Hon. Members: "Oh!"] It is either that, or I shall keep speaking and no one else will —
Madam Deputy Speaker: Order.   I have already asked hon. Members to debate the motion on the Order Paper.   Perhaps we would all do well to confine our remarks to that.
Tony Blair speaks to parliament in London July 13, 2005. British politicians of all shades have united since London's bomb attacks but some are beginning to break ranks. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on London's transport network, which killed at least 52, only MP's like George Galloway dared criticize the prime minister. Photo: Karim Kadim
Tony Blair speaks to parliament in London July 13, 2005. British politicians of all shades have united since London's bomb attacks but some are beginning to break ranks.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on London's transport network, which killed at least 52, only MP's like George Galloway dared criticize the prime minister.
10,000 Bin Ladens
Mr. Galloway: The exchanges that we have just heard are further evidence of my point that in this bubble people just do not get it.   If I cannot touch the heart of the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead with what happened to the people in Falluja, I shall move on to firmer ground.
Does the House not believe that hatred and bitterness have been engendered by the invasion and occupation of Iraq, by the daily destruction of Palestinian homes, by the construction of the great apartheid wall in Palestine and by the occupation of Afghanistan?
Does it understand that the bitterness and enmity generated by those great events feed the terrorism of bin Laden and the other Islamists?
Is that such a controversial point?
Is it not obvious?
When I was on the Labour Benches and spoke in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I said that I despise Osama bin Laden.
The difference is that I have always despised him.   I did so when the Government, in this very House, gave him guns, money and encouragement, and set him to war in Afghanistan.
I said that if they handled that event in the wrong way, they would create 10,000 bin Ladens.
Does anyone doubt that 10,000 bin Ladens at least have been created by the events of the past two and a half years?
If they do, they have their head in the sand.
The more people killed in Iraq ... the higher the price of oil in the stock market !!! Image: www.aljazeerah.info/Emad Hajjaj, Alquds Alarabi, 7/2/05
The more people killed in Iraq ... the higher the price of oil in the stock market!!!
See how it feels?
The media frenzy to vilify and demonize those few who fight against the ideology of greed is silly with speculative whining and stances of feigned horror.
Why did that nice boy or girl become a bomber?
Why are teenagers ready to sacrifice themselves as their part in a sacred struggle against their tormentors?
I’ll tell you why.
Those resisters who fight back are enemies of the United States of Greed.
They are sickened by the death and destruction waged by the greed gods proclaiming democracy and freedom.
Their water and air poisoned, their villages bombed, their children deformed, their culture decapitated, their homes bulldozed.
They are righteously furious.
They are striking back with blows that say “see how it feels?”
Husayn Al-Kurdi and Dr. June Scorza Terpstra — IPS
War and Ideology
A girl wipes her tears as forces search her house during a raid in Baghdad. Photo: AFP/Liu Jin
A girl wipes her tears as forces search her house during a raid in Baghdad.
Guantanamo
There are more people in the world today who hate us more intently than they did before as a result of the actions that we have taken.
Does this House understand that the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison have inflamed and deepened that sense of hatred around the world and made our position more dangerous?
Do Members of this House not understand that Guantanamo Bay has contributed to the sense of bitterness and hatred against us around the world?
Does nobody in this House understand that when Palestinians' houses are knocked down, their olive trees cut down and their children shot by Israeli marksmen, an army of people who want to harm us is created?
To say that is not to hope that they succeed — I started by making clear, I hope, my utter rejection and condemnation of the events in London this morning.
It does not matter whether Britain replaces the Trident submarine system with another.
The threat now, as the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (John Smith) made clear, is not the intercontinental ballistic missiles of other countries but the asymmetrical threat of angry people who hate us and who are ready to exchange their lives for several of ours, or hundreds of ours, or thousands of ours, if they can do so.
Is that really so hard to grasp?
       The object of torture is torture      
       47 year old family father died on US military base Al Asad in US custody on January 9th 2004     
       Guantanamo Hunger Strikers being tortured   
Blair's bombs
Terror and the UK — The senseless repercussions of interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine demand that we renew our anger at our leaders.   Our troops must come home.   We owe it to all those who died in London on 7 July.
By John Pilger
In all the coverage of the bombing of London, a truth has struggled to be heard.   With honourable exceptions, it has been said guardedly, apologetically.   Occasionally, a member of the public has broken the silence, as an east Londoner did when he walked in front of a CNN camera crew and reporter in mid-platitude.   "Iraq!" he said.   "We invaded Iraq and what did we expect? Go on, say it."
Alex Salmond tried to say it on Today on Radio 4.   He was told he was speaking "in poor taste . . . before the bodies are even buried".   George Galloway was lectured on Newsnight (BBC2) that he was being "crass".   The inimitable Ken Livingstone contradicted his previous statement, which was that the invasion of Iraq would come home to London.   With the exception of Galloway, not one so-called anti-war MP spoke out in clear, unequivocal English.   The warmongers were allowed to fix the boundaries of public debate; one of the more idiotic, in the Guardian, called Blair "the world's leading statesman".
And yet, like the man who interrupted CNN, people understand and know why, just as the majority of Britons oppose the war and believe Blair is a liar.   This frightens the political elite.   At a large media party I attended, many of the important guests uttered "Iraq" and "Blair" as a kind of catharsis for that which they dared not say professionally and publicly.
The bombs of 7 July were Blair's bombs.
Blair brought home to this country his and George W Bush's illegal, unprovoked and blood-soaked adventure in the Middle East.   Were it not for his epic irresponsibility, the Londoners who died in the Tube and on the No 30 bus almost certainly would be alive today.   This is what Livingstone ought to have said.   To paraphrase perhaps the only challenging question put to Blair on the eve of the invasion (by John Humphrys), it is now surely beyond all doubt that the man is unfit to be Prime Minister.
How much more evidence is needed?   Before the invasion, Blair was warned by the Joint Intelligence Committee that "by far the greatest terrorist threat" to this country would be "heightened by military action against Iraq".   He was warned by 79 per cent of Londoners who, according to a YouGov survey in February 2003, believed that a British attack on Iraq "would make a terrorist attack on London more likely".   A month ago, a leaked, classified CIA report revealed that the invasion had turned Iraq into a focal point of terrorism.   Before the invasion, said the CIA, Iraq "exported no terrorist threat to its neighbours" because Saddam Hussein was "implacably hostile to al-Qaeda".
Blair serious liability
Now, a report by the Chatham House organisation, a "think-tank" deep within the British establishment, may well beckon Blair's coup de grace.   Published on 18 July, it says there is "no doubt" the invasion of Iraq has "given a boost to the al-Qaeda network" in "propaganda, recruitment and fundraising" while providing an ideal targeting and training area for terrorists.   "Riding pillion with a powerful ally" has cost Iraqi, American and British lives.   The right-wing academic Paul Wilkinson, a voice of western power, was the principal author.   Read between the lines, and it says the Prime Minister is now a serious liability.   Those who run this country know he has committed a great crime; the "link" has been made.
Blair's bunker-mantra is that there was terrorism long before the invasion, notably 11 September 2001.   Anyone with an understanding of the painful history of the Middle East would not have been surprised by 11 September or by the bombings of Madrid and London, only that they had not happened earlier.   I have reported the region for 35 years, and if I could describe in a word how millions of Arab and Muslim people felt, I would say "humiliated".   When Egypt looked like winning back its captured territory in the 1973 war with Israel, I walked through jubilant crowds in Cairo: it felt as if the weight of history's humiliation had lifted.   In a very Egyptian flourish, one man said to me, "We once chased cricket balls at the British Club.   Now we are free."
They were not free, of course.   The Americans resupplied the Israeli army and they almost lost everything again.   In Palestine, the humiliation of a captive people is Israeli policy.   How many Palestinian babies have died at Israeli checkpoints after their mothers, bleeding and screaming in premature labour, have been forced to give birth beside the road at a military checkpoint with the lights of a hospital in the distance?   How many old men have been forced to make obeisance to young Israeli conscripts?   How many families have been blown to bits by American-supplied F-16s using British-supplied parts?
Infrastructure left in apocalyptic state
The gravity of the bombing of London, said a BBC commentator, "can be measured by the fact that it marks Britain's first suicide bombing".   What about Iraq?   There were no suicide bombers in Iraq until Blair and Bush invaded.   What about Palestine?   There were no suicide bombers in Palestine until Ariel Sharon, an accredited war criminal sponsored by Bush and Blair, came to power.   In the 1991 Gulf "war", American and British forces left more than 200,000 Iraqis dead and injured, and the infrastructure of their country in "an apocalyptic state", according to the United Nations.   The subsequent embargo, designed and promoted by zealots in Washington and Whitehall, was not unlike a medieval siege.   Denis Halliday, the United Nations official assigned to administer the near-starvation food allowance, called it "genocidal".
I witnessed its consequences:  tracts of southern Iraq contaminated with depleted uranium, and cluster bomblets waiting to explode.   I watched dying children, some of the half a million infants whose deaths Unicef attributed to the embargo — deaths which the US secretary of state Madeleine Albright said were "worth it".   In the west, this was hardly reported.   Throughout the Muslim world, the bitterness was like a presence, its contagion reaching many young British-born Muslims.
In 2001, in revenge for the killing of 3,000 people in the twin towers, more than 20,000 Muslims died in the Anglo-American invasion of Afghanistan.   This was revealed by Jonathan Steele in the Guardian but never became news, to my knowledge.   The attack on Iraq was the Rubicon, making the reprisal against Madrid and the bombing of London entirely predictable:  this last "in response to the massacres carried out by Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan", claimed the Secret Organisation Group of al-Qaeda in Europe.   Whether or not the claim was genuine, the reason was.   Bush and Blair wanted a "war on terror" and they got it.   Omitted from public discussion is that their state terror makes al-Qaeda's appear minuscule by comparison.   More than 100,000 Iraqi men, woman and children have been killed not by suicide bombers, but by the Anglo-American "coalition", says a peer-reviewed study published in the Lancet, and largely ignored.
In his poem "From Iraq", Michael Rosen wrote:
We are the unfound
We are uncounted
You don't see the homes we made
We're not even the small print or the bit in brackets . . .
because we lived far from you . . .
because you have cameras that point the other way . . .
Imagine, for a moment, you are in the Iraqi city of Fallujah.   It is an American police state, like a vast penned ghetto.   Since April last year, the hospitals there have been subjected to an American policy of collective punishment.   Staff have been attacked by US marines, doctors have been shot, emergency medicines blocked.   Children have been murdered in front of their families.
Now imagine the same state of affairs imposed on the London hospitals that received the victims of the bombing.   When will someone draw this parallel at one of Blair's staged "press conferences", at which he is allowed to emote for the cameras about "our values outlast[ing] theirs"?   Silence is not journalism.   In Fallujah, the people know "our values" only too well.   And when will someone invite the obsequious Bob Geldof to explain why his hero's smoke-and-mirrors "debt cancellation" amounts to less than the money the Blair government spends in a week, brutalising Iraq?
As an industrial killer, Christianity leaves Islam for dead
The hand-wringing over "whither Islam's soul" is another distraction.   As an industrial killer, Christianity leaves Islam for dead.   The cause of the current terrorism is neither religion nor hatred for "our way of life":  it is political, requiring a political solution.   It is injustice and double standards, which plant the deepest grievances.   That, and the culpability of our leaders, and the "cameras that point the other way", are the core of it.
On 19 July, while the BBC governors were holding their annual general meeting at Television Centre, an inspired group of British documentary film-makers met outside the main gates and conducted a series of news reports of the kind you do not see on television.   Actors played famous reporters doing their "pieces to camera".   The "stories" they reported included the targeting of the civilian population of Iraq, the application of the Nuremberg Principles to Iraq, America's illegal rewriting of the laws of Iraq, and theft of its resources through privatisation, the everyday torture and humiliation of ordinary people and the failure to protect Iraqis' archaeological and cultural heritage.
Blair is using the London bombings to further deplete our rights and those of others, as Bush has done in America.   Their goal is not security, but greater control.   The memory of their victims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and elsewhere demands the renewal of our anger.   The troops must come home.   Nothing less is owed to those who died and suffered in London on 7 July, unnecessarily, and nothing less is owed to those whose lives are marked if this travesty endures.
© New Statesman 1913 — 2005
War Crimes
On Haditha and Al-Qa’im, an Iraqi doctor sent me this email yesterday:
"Listen...we witnessed crimes in the west area of the country of what the bastards did in Haditha and Al-Qa’im.  It was a crime, a really big crime we have witnessed and filmed in those places and recently also in Fallujah.
We need big help in the western area of the country.  Our doctors need urgent help there.
Please, this is an URGENT humanitarian request from the hospitals in the west of the country.
We have big proof on how the American troops destroyed one of our hospitals, how they burned the whole store of medication of the west area of Iraq and how they killed a patient in the ward...how they prevented us from helping the people in al-Qa’im.
This is an URGENT Humanitarian request.
The hospitals in the west of Iraq ask for urgent help...we are in a big humanitarian medical disaster..."
       War Crimes — Dahr Jamail — World Tribunal on Iraq       
       World Tribunal       
       War Crimes — Illegality of Preventive Attack       
       Unilateral Use of Force       
Three month old Iraqi girl Mariam Ghassan receives emergency care at the Yarmouk hospital for a head wound from one of three bomb attacks Sunday, July 17, 2005, in Baghdad, Iraq. Three bomb attacks rattled the city before noon following a massive explosion caused by a suicide bomber late Saturday night in Mussayib, Iraq killing at least 60 people. Photo: AP/Mohammed Uraibi
Three month old Iraqi girl Mariam Ghassan receives emergency care at the Yarmouk hospital for a head wound from one of three bomb attacks Sunday, July 17, 2005, in Baghdad, Iraq.
Three bomb attacks rattled the city before noon following a massive explosion caused by a suicide bomber late Saturday night in Mussayib, Iraq killing at least 60 people.
Trying to reduce hatred
Given that one cannot defend oneself against every angry man among the enragés of the earth, it follows that the only thing we can do is address what the Secretary of State called the causal circumstances that lie behind these events.
That means trying to reduce the hatred in the world and trying to deal with the political crises out of which these events have flowed.
If, instead of doing that, we remain in this consensual bubble in which we have placed ourselves, we will go on making the same mistakes over and over again.   We will go on with Guantanamo Bay.   We will go on as we are doing, making Abu Ghraib not smaller as we were told would happen after the photographs were published, but bigger.
We will go on with occupation and war as the principal instruments of our foreign and defence policy.   If we do that, some people will get through and hurt us as they have hurt us here today, and if we still do not learn the lesson, that dismal, melancholic cycle will continue.
It ought to be common sense that people start from the standpoint that the only thing that matters is whether what we plan to do will make things better or worse.
Afghanistan
I listened to the Secretary of State lay out the success story of Afghanistan and Iraq, and his account bore no relationship to the truth or reality.
He talked about Afghanistan as a success story and about the President of Afghanistan, when everyone knows that Karzai is the president of the congestion charge area of downtown Kabul and no more.
He talked about an Afghan army — it is a fantasy.
Afghanistan is a patchwork quilt of warlordism, where the warlords' armies dwarf the so — called Afghan national army.
Heroin
He talked about drugs and narcotics: before we invaded the country those lunatics of the Taliban were reducing heroin production in Afghanistan, but the people whom we have put into power there have increased production by 800 per cent.
Our armed forces are in Afghanistan and our taxes are being used to support a political structure that is producing 90 per cent of the junk that ends up in the veins of our young people in Glasgow, east London and many other places in the world.
The Secretary of State talked about Iraq — as if Iraq were any kind of success story.
I could not believe my ears as he described, in that complacent, orotund manner, progress over 12 months, 18 months or two years.
Iraq is going backwards, not forwards.   It is impossible for the Secretary of State to say we shall withdraw in any given time frame, because Iraq is getting worse, not better.
There are more people being killed in Iraq now than there were before.   More military operations are being conducted by the Iraqi resistance than before.   Last Saturday alone, 175 military operations were mounted by the Iraqi resistance on one day.
       Western Terror States: Canada, US, UK, France, Germany, Italy      
       Photos of Afghanistan people being killed and injured by NATO      
     Cluster bombs Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon     
      US new generation of landmines called Spider      
Over the pond, ten percent of wounded are amputees
US soldiers on patrol in the northern city of Mosul. The US military has announced the deaths of three more soldiers in a bomb attack in Iraq. Photo: AFP/Marwan Ibrahim
US soldiers on patrol in the northern city of Mosul.
The US military has announced the deaths of three more soldiers in a bomb attack in Iraq.
American soldiers are dying in such numbers that there is now more appreciation of the mistake of the war in Iraq over the pond in the United States than there appears to be here in the British House of Commons.
The kind of debate that we have had today would not happen in the US Congress, because US politicians understand the scale of this disaster far better than the politicians in this Chamber appear even to have begun to do.
One thousand, eight hundred American boys, conscripted by poverty, unemployment and poor opportunities, have lost their lives as a result of the pack of lies that was the case for the invasion of Iraq, and 17,000 American boys have been wounded.
Ten percent of them are amputees, who will have to go around with no legs for the rest of their lives as a result of the pack of lies on which we went to war in Iraq.
Gorden Gentle is dead
Eighty-nine of our own boys, including the son of Rose Gentle from Glasgow, 19-year-old Gordon, were sent to die in Iraq on a pack of lies.
The Prime Minister will not even meet Gordon's mother.
He will not meet the mother of a 19-year-old boy who was sent to die in Iraq.
Gordon Gentle with sister Pam. I'm sitting tonight going through some stuff and I came across my fist letter and sadly my last. We got it back when Gordon died. In my letter I tell him what’s going on at home trying to cheer him up but watching that I don’t upset him and make him home sick. In the letter I tell him “keep your chin up you be out of there soon’. Well, soon came too soon thanks to Tony Blair. Yes my brother came home but not the way I wanted, he came home in a coffin. Photo: www.mfaw.org.uk
Gordon Gentle with sister Pam.
I'm sitting tonight going through some stuff and I came across my fist letter and sadly my last.
We got it back when Gordon died.
In my letter I tell him what’s going on at home trying to cheer him up but watching that I don’t upset him and make him home sick.
In the letter I tell him “keep your chin up you'll be out of there soon’.
Well, soon came too soon thanks to Tony Blair.
Yes my brother came home but not the way I wanted, he came home in a coffin.
Last Monday, I was on a television programme and a call came through from the mother of a 17-year-old soldier who was leaving for Iraq the following Monday.
He is 17 years old, and he is being sent to Iraq, into that quagmire.
The 19-year-old Gordon Gentle is dead.
Eighty-eight other young men from this country are dead as a result of this, yet our Ministers roll out their jokes and their cod philosophy here today.
Lost in false reality
They have absolutely no grasp of the gravity of the situation, or of how unpopular their stand has become outside these walls.
They have learned nothing from the fact that they lost a million votes as a result of what they did in Iraq, or from the fact that millions in Britain marched against them and begged them not to do this.
The hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones), in an otherwise fine speech, described today's events as "unpredictable".
They were not remotely unpredictable.
Our own security services predicted them and warned the Government that if we did this we would be at greater risk from terrorist attacks such as the one that we have suffered this morning
You by extension are the enemy
People who can still think and feel want to self-determine their economic systems.
Some of those people fighting against the invasion of the world-snatchers reject usury, the very operational foundations of the financial and banking RottenFellers who run the current New World Order.
People fight to defend their homelands and decide their own ideological, moral and spiritual beliefs and their social, cultural, religious or philosophical practices.
The invaded and occupied people of the world are fighting for self-determination.
How criminal is that?
How dare you portray yourself as superior and tell the world that you know better than anyone else when all you want is their oil, their water, their labor, and their stuff.
Is there anything that you really do not understand about why people fight back or did you forget that your rulers and you by extension are the enemy?
Husayn Al-Kurdi and Dr. June Scorza Terpstra — IPS
War and Ideology
Anjem Choudray speaks at a press conference in London, Saturday, Sept. 11, 2004.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Choudary, leader of the disbanded Muhajiroun extremist group, blamed the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair and its 'crusader views' of Muslims for the July 7 2005 suicide bomb attacks against the London transport system.
He also said the British public shared the blame for ignoring al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden's warning last year that Britain would be attacked if it did not withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Iraq: This is now an unwinnable conflict
As he completes another tour of duty in the chaos of Iraq, award-winning reporter Patrick Cockburn charts how Bush and Blair's 'winnable war' turned into a mess that is inspiring a worldwide insurgency
Published: 24 July 2005
The Duke of Wellington, warning hawkish politicians in Britain against ill-considered military intervention abroad, once said:  "Great nations do not have small wars."   He meant that supposedly limited conflicts can inflict terrible damage on powerful states.   Having seen what a small war in Spain had done to Napoleon, he knew what he was talking about.
The war in Iraq is now joining the Boer War in 1899 and the Suez crisis in 1956 as ill-considered ventures that have done Britain more harm than good.   It has demonstrably strengthened al-Qa'ida by providing it with a large pool of activists and sympathisers across the Muslim world it did not possess before the invasion of 2003.   The war, which started out as a demonstration of US strength as the world's only superpower, has turned into a demonstration of weakness.   Its 135,000-strong army does not control much of Iraq.
The suicide bombing campaign in Iraq is unique.   Never before have so many fanatical young Muslims been willing to kill themselves, trying to destroy those whom they see as their enemies.   On a single day in Baghdad this month 12 bombers blew themselves up.   There have been more than 500 suicide attacks in Iraq over the last year.
It is this campaign which has now spread to Britain and Egypt.   The Iraq war has radicalised a significant part of the Muslim world.   Most of the bombers in Iraq are non-Iraqi, but the network of sympathisers and supporters who provide safe houses, money, explosives, detonators, vehicles and intelligence is home-grown.
The shrill denials by Tony Blair and Jack Straw that hostility to the invasion of Iraq motivated the bombers are demonstrably untrue.   The findings of an investigation, to be published soon, into 300 young Saudis, caught and interrogated by Saudi intelligence on their way to Iraq to fight or blow themselves up, shows that very few had any previous contact with al-Qa'ida or any other terrorist organisation previous to 2003.   It was the invasion of Iraq which prompted their decision to die.
Some 36 Saudis who did blow themselves up in Iraq did so for similar reasons, according to the same study, commissioned by the Saudi government and carried out by a US-trained Saudi researcher, Nawaf Obaid, who was given permission to speak to Saudi intelligence officers.   A separate Israeli study of 154 foreign fighters in Iraq, carried out by the Global Research in International Affairs Centre in Israel, also concluded that almost all had been radicalised by Iraq alone.
Before Iraq, those who undertook suicide bombings were a small, hunted group; since the invasion they have become a potent force, their ideology and tactics adopted by militant Islamic groups around the world.   Their numbers may still not be very large but they are numerous enough to create mayhem in Iraq and anywhere else they strike, be it in London or Sharm el Sheikh.
The bombers have paralysed Baghdad.   I have spent half my time living in Iraq since the invasion.   The country has never been so dangerous as today.   Some targets have been hit again and again.   The army recruiting centre at al-Muthana old municipal airport in the middle of Baghdad has been attacked no fewer than eight times, the last occasion on Wednesday when eight people were killed.
The detonations of the suicide bombs make my windows shake in their frames in my room in the al-Hamra hotel.   Sometimes, thinking the glass is going to shatter, I take shelter behind a thick wall.
The hotel is heavily guarded.   At one time the man who looked for bombs under cars entering the compound with a mirror on the end of a stick carried a pistol in his right hand.   He reckoned that if he did discover a suicide bomber he had a split second in which to shoot him in the head before the driver detonated his bomb.
The bombers, or rather the defences against them, have altered the appearance of Baghdad.   US army and Iraqi government positions in Baghdad are surrounded by ramparts of enormous cement blocks which snake through the city.   Manufactured in different sizes, each of which is named after a different American state such as Arkansas and Wisconsin, these concrete megaliths are strangling the city by closing off so many streets.
For all the newspaper and television coverage of Iraq, the foreign media still fail to convey the lethal and anarchic quality of day-to-day living.   The last time I drove into west Baghdad from the airport in early July we were suddenly stopped by the sound of volleys of shots.
This turned out to be the police commandos, a 12,000-strong paramilitary force which is meant to be the cutting edge of the government offensive against the insurgents.   On this occasion they had loaded coffins wrapped in Iraqi flags, containing the bodies of two of their officers murdered that morning, on to the backs of their pick-ups and were weaving through the traffic, firing over our heads.   Drivers slammed on their brakes since people detained by the commandos, often for no known reason, are often found later in rubbish dumps, having been tortured and executed.
The government, whose members seldom emerge from the Green Zone, make bizarre efforts to pretend that there are signs of a return to normality.   Last week a pro-government newspaper had an article on the reconstruction of Baghdad.   Above the article was a picture of a crane at a building site.   But there are no cranes at work in Baghdad so the paper had been compelled to use a photograph of a crane which has been rusting for more than two years, abandoned at the site of a giant mosque that Saddam Hussein was constructing when he was overthrown.
The same quality of make-believe mars British and American policy in Iraq.   The current motto of both governments is to "stay the course in Iraq".   This may be useful propaganda at home but Iraqi government officials counter that London and Washington have no "course" in Iraq, only a policy of endless zig-zags.
For future historians Iraq will probably replace Vietnam as the stock example of the truth of Wellington's dictum about small wars escalating into big ones.   Ironically, the US and Britain pretended in 2003 that Saddam ruled a powerful state capable of menacing his neighbours.   Secretly they believed this was untrue and expected an easy victory.
Now in 2005 they find to their horror that there are people in Iraq more truly dangerous than Saddam, and they are mired in an un-winnable conflict.
©2005 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd.  All rights reserved
          
Being a Muslim for a month
By Kris Evans in the United States
Monday 11 July 2005
 
Dave Stacy (R), with his hosts Shamael and Sadia Shakir Haque
From eating McDonald's to being a Muslim for 30 days, a new documentary series by Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me fame delves into the lives of Muslims in America.
For 30 Days, a Christian from the Bible Belt lived with a Muslim family in Michigan.   The result?   Heated arguments, religious confusion, and the start of a beautiful friendship.
Spurlock single-handedly took on the world's largest fast-food chain with his first documentary, Super Size Me, which saw the filmmaker eat nothing but McDonald's for 30 days.
The documentary was nominated for an Oscar in 2004, and although they deny the film was a motivating factor, McDonald's has now stopped the Super Size option in the US.
"After the test screening of Super Size Me, we knew we had something great that tapped into something visceral and personal in people," says Spurlock over breakfast in a Los Angeles diner.
“We don't get any happy Muslim stories.   We don't get 'Here's a great thing a Muslim did today' and I wanted to do a show that would demonstrate what it is like to be a Muslim in America”
Morgan Spurlock,
documentary maker
Inspired by the debate that raged following early screenings of his McDonald's epic, he sought new subjects to put under the microscope.   Top of the list was being a Muslim in post-9/11 America.
"We don't get any happy Muslim stories," he says.   "We don't get 'Here's a great thing a Muslim did today' and I wanted to do a show that would demonstrate what it is like to be a Muslim in America."
Experiment
The stage was set: Spurlock would take an ordinary American — if such a thing exists — and have him live with a Muslim family, observing all their customs, for one month.
Finding the participants was not easy, Spurlock on one hand being careful to weed out those looking for Reality TV-style fame while at the same time trying to find a Muslim family who did not feel they were walking into a trap.
"As with most communities, the Muslim community is very tight knit and very protective, especially in post 9/11 America," says Spurlock.   "They scrutinise any journalistic integrity and you can see why, with what's happened."
 
Dave Stacy had initially thought Muslim meant a man with a gun
The guinea pig in this experiment would be Dave Stacy, a 33-year-old insurance sales executive from West Virginia.
Stacy is described in the show as a "beer-drinking, pork-eating American".   As a practising Christian with no knowledge of Islam, Stacy admitted — before embarking on his 30-day journey — that he had felt reassured after 9/11 when he saw Muslims profiled at airports.
When Spurlock pressed him for what came to mind when someone said the word "Muslim", Stacy replied: "A man with an AK-47, at war with someone."
Mutual scepticism
The scepticism was not only on Stacy's side.
"We were worried that this was someone very opinionated about Muslims," says Shamael Haque, a first year resident in neuropsychiatry at Henry Ford hospital in Detroit.
Haque, along with his wife Sadia Shakir, who attends the Thomas Cooley Law School, put these reservations aside and opened their Dearborn, Michigan, home to this stranger from the Bible Belt.
“I had a lot of sleepless nights, the days were 15 hours of heated debates, often about global economics and politics, something which — like many Americans — I don't know that much about.   It was information overload”
Dave Stacy, who lived as a Muslim for 30 days
During his 30 days, Stacy lived, ate and prayed with his Muslim hosts.
He also read the Quran, tried to learn Arabic and visited a halal slaughterhouse.   In one very tense scene, he went out on to the street to petition Americans into signing a bill to stop the profiling of Muslim Americans.
Looking back at the experience, Stacy recounts how he would often hear shouts of "Faith Traitor!" and "American Taliban!", while in Muslim areas he was approached by people who, as Stacy says, "thought the whole show was a conspiracy to make them look bad".
Traditional dress
Stacy was dressed most of the time in a salwar and kurta, something which initially bothered Sadia Shakir Haque.
"I did think 'Why are you wearing this clothing when none of us wear this?'   It's not realistic," she says.
But the producers were adamant that Stacy make this change in his dress as well as grow a beard.   Their insistence on this point certainly created a more eventful trip to the airport where Stacy, dressed in his new Pakistani attire, felt what many Muslims have gone through at airports since the September 11 2001 attacks on the United States.
He was stopped for the first time in his life, searched, and stared at throughout the journey.
Stacy laughs, looking back on the flight.   "A lady sitting next to me on the plane was so nervous she couldn't knit," he says.
Discussions
During the daytime, while the Haques were at work, Stacy took regular meetings with a local imam.   But their sessions did not produce the clear answers and explanations Stacy was searching for and he started to look elsewhere.
 
Morgan Spurlock says Americans do not think beyond their towns
Enter Ameer, his Arabic teacher.   In the fun and relaxed atmosphere of an English speaker trying to get his mouth around Arabic pronunciation, Stacy made his first tentative steps into understanding the religion.
"Ameer initially was there to teach me Arabic but it was so much more," says Stacy.   "It's so strange for me, as fond as I am of him, to think that he was one of the people I was vilifying.   It's really opened my eyes."
That is Stacy talking now, but at the time the amount of new information was almost too much.
"I had a lot of sleepless nights, the days were 15 hours of heated debates, often about global economics and politics, something which — like many Americans — I don't know that much about.   It was information overload.   At night I had time with my thoughts — thoughts I had not had before."
In one scene, Stacy is clearly taken aback to learn that Muslims are part of the same monotheistic tradition that he follows himself.
It seemed to highlight simultaneously how little most Americans know about Islam, and how much work American Muslims still have to do in taking control of their image.
"We need to make a better effort in how we are represented," says Sadia Shakir Haque, echoing a point she made in the documentary.   "We take it for granted living in Muslim communities, and we must not forget how we are perceived by those outside it."
Sadia Shakir Haque's experience living in Miami's melting pot, where it was common to see Jewish women — not to mention the Catholic nuns on her college campus — covering their hair, helped her give some context to Stacy while educating him on the hijab.
"I explained to him that Muslim women were continuing that sense of modesty."
September 11
A dinner discussion where Stacy questioned why Muslim Americans had not come out more strongly and condemned the attacks on the World Trade Centre created one of the most illustrative scenes on the divide of viewpoints.

“There are deeper issues about Muslims in that region (Middle East)... We can't just say these people are crazy. We need to ask what would make them so crazy that they would do that”
Shamael Haque, Stacy's host for 30 days, speaking about 9/11

Shamael Haque's view was that in post 9/11 America the key questions were simply not being asked.
"There are deeper issues about Muslims in that region, and what would lead a person to do something as irrational as that.   But if people do ask questions, then they are viewed as unpatriotic," he says.
"We can't just say these people are crazy.   We need to ask what would make them so crazy that they would do that."
Stacy was clearly uncomfortable facing up to this question.
"I had these feelings that I was being unpatriotic," he says, but adds that since the documentary was finished he has found himself engaging in political discussions more often.
Friday prayers
Stacy's other major obstacle was praying in a mosque, something which he said at the start of the documentary he would not be willing to do.
Spurlock says: "For me the best line of the episode is when Dave is conflicted about going to his first juma and he is overcome with emotion and goes to Imam Husseini and says, 'I just don't know if I believe this, what you're saying.'   And the imam replies, 'David, you're here to learn, not to believe.'"
A participant in another of Spurlock's documentaries in the series quit before the end of his 30 days, but Stacy lasted the course, eventually taking part in the prayer at the mosque.
Stacy and the Haques have kept in contact and are planning on meeting this summer.
“We can't demonise six million American Muslims.   There are 270 million Americans out there and the last time I checked, Timothy McVeigh wasn't a Muslim.   So I think that we just need to preach a little tolerance”
Morgan Spurlock, documentary maker
"We expected him not to know the principles," says Shamael Haque.   "But he was very receptive, open to learning."
Harsh words
Where the rest of the nation is concerned, Spurlock ends with some harsh words.
"We're a country where 15% have passports.   We don't think beyond our borders so why should we think beyond our own towns?   We are in this protective world.   We're a nation that doesn't read newspapers, we don't read books.
"For me, that's why a show like this is important, to get some information out there to educate people.   We can't demonise six million American Muslims.   There are 270 million Americans out there and the last time I checked, Timothy McVeigh wasn't a Muslim.   So I think that we just need to preach a little tolerance."
                  Aljazeera
Testimony on War Crimes and the Recent Situation in Iraq
Pictures of a crying Iraqi woman and injured Iraqi childeren appear on a poster at the second day session of the World Tribunal on Iraq Istanbul session in Topkapi Palace Photo: AFP/Cem Turkel
Pictures of a crying Iraqi woman and injured Iraqi childeren appear on a poster at the second day session of the World Tribunal on Iraq Istanbul session in Topkapi Palace.
by Dahr Jamail
In May of 2004 I was interviewing a man who had just been released from Abu Ghraib.   Like so many I interviewed from various US military detention facilities who'd been tortured horrifically, he still managed to maintain his sense of humor.
Beat prisoners
He began laughing when telling of how US soldiers made him beat other prisoners.   He laughed because he told me he had been beaten himself prior to this, and was so tired that all he could do to beat other detained Iraqis was to lift his arm and let it drop on the other men.
Later in the same interview when telling of another story he laughed again and said, "The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house."
Ongoing violations of International law
But this testimony is not about the indomitable spirit of the Iraqi people.
About the dignity and strength of Iraqis, we need no testimony.
This testimony is about ongoing violations of international law being committed by the occupiers of Iraq on a daily basis in regards to rampant torture, the neglect and impeding of the health care sector and the ongoing failure to allow Iraqis to reconstruct their infrastructure.
To discuss torture — there are so many stories I could use here, but I'll use two examples which are indicative of scores of others I documented while in Iraq.
Destruction and Humiliation Victims of the Anglo-American Aggression in Iraq Civilians make up 98 percent of the millions of dead and injured victims since the invasion. Photo: Al-atheer.com
Ali Shalal Abbas was living in the Al-Amiriyah district of Baghdad.   So many of his neighbors were detained that friends urged him to go to the nearby US base to try to get answers.
Since he worked for civil administration, he went three times to get answers as to why so many innocent people were being detained during US home raids.
On the fourth time he was detained himself, despite not being charged with any crime.   This was September 13th, 2003.   Within two days he was transferred from a military base to Abu Ghraib, where he was held for over three months.
"The minute I got there, the suffering began," said Abbas, "I asked him for water, and he said after the investigation I would get some.   He accused me of so many things and asked me so many questions.   Among them he said I hated Christians."
He was forced to strip naked shortly after arriving, and remained that way for most of his stay in the prison.   "My hands were enlarged because there was no blood because they cuffed them so tight.   My head was covered with the sack, and they fastened my right hand to a pole with handcuffs.   They made me stand on my toes to clip me to it."
Abbas said soldiers doused him in cold water while holding him under a fan, and oftentimes, "They put on a loudspeaker, put the speakers on my ears and said, "Shut Up, Fuck Fuck Fuck!"
Treatment included holding a loaded gun to his head to make him not cry out in pain as his hand-ties were tightened.
He was not provided water and food for extended periods of time.   Sleep deprivation via the aforementioned method was the norm.
Crutches on
the side of him
Body of loved one — man with disability — in home in Fallujah. Photo: http://dahrjamailiraq.com/
Body of loved one — man with disability — in home in Fallujah when US forces attacked December 2004
Send you to hell
Abbas said that at one point, "Two men came, one a foreigner and one a translator.   He asked me who I was.   I said I'm a human being.   They told me, "We are going to cut your head off and send you to hell.   We will take you to Guantanamo.?"
A female soldier told him, "Our aim is to put you in hell so you would tell the truth.   These are the orders we have from our superiors, to turn your lives into hell."
Another time one of the guards said it was time for "celebrations."
"They made some of the detainees strip naked and threw cold water on them," said Abbas, "And made them run and smash their faces against the walls while the guard was whistling."
Other treatment included, as Abbas added, "They put us on top of each other while we were naked.   They made us lay on top of each other naked as if it was sex, and beat us with a broom."
I am a donkey
A female guard told the male detainees that the penis of a dog was longer than theirs, and for Abbas and several other detainees she made them strip naked, tied their hands tightly behind their backs, threw them on the ground, and made them say, "I am a donkey" over and over while they were forced to lick the ground.
Other treatment included having their food thrown in the trash in front of them and beating them on their genitals.   Abbas added, "They shit on us, used dogs against us, used electricity and starved us.
He also said, "They cut my hair into strips like an Indian.   They cut my mustache, put a plate in my hand, and made me go beg from the prisoners, as if I was a beggar."
Desecration of his religion was, of course, included as part of their humiliation.
Abbas was made to fast during the first day of Eid, the breaking of the fast of Ramadan, which is haram (forbidden).
He told me that one day a female soldier stripped naked and other soldiers held his eyes open to make him look at her.    Sometimes at night when he would read his Koran, he had to hold it in the hallway for light.   "Soldiers would walk by and kick the Holy Koran, and sometimes they would try to piss on it or wipe shit on it."
Abbas did not feel this was the work of a few individual soldiers.   "This was organized, it wasn't just individuals, and every one of the troops in Abu Ghraib was responsible for it."
The Americans are the teachers
He added, "Saddam Hussein used to have people like those who tortured us.   Why do they put Saddam into trial, but they do not put the Americans to trial.   I have full confidence that Saddam used to do these things, because he is a stupid student.   But the Americans are the teachers."
Towards the end of his interview, Abbas stated, "America does not have a future in the world, the statue of liberty has been smashed by the boots of the American troops.   And this is all because of Abu Ghraib.   Saddam Hussein was a cruel enemy to us.   I hoped that I was killed by him though, rather than being alive with the Americans.   After this journey of torture and suffering, what else can I think?"
Other Iraqis, such as Sadiq Zoman, didn't have it as good as Abbas.   55 year-old Zoman, detained from his home in Kirkuk in a raid by US soldiers that produced no weapons, was taken to a police office in Kirkuk, the Kirkuk Airport Detention Center, the Tikrit Airport Detention Center and then the 28th Combat Support Hospital, where he was treated by Dr. Michael Hodges, a US army medic.
Hypoxic brain injury
Dr. Hodges' medical report listed the primary diagnoses of Zoman's condition as hypoxic brain injury (brain damage caused by lack of oxygen) "with persistent vegetative state, myocardial infarction (heart attack), and heat stroke."
Thus, Zoman was dropped off at the General Hospital in Tikrit by US soldiers after being held for one month.   He was in a coma when he was dropped off with a copy of the medical report written by Lt. Col. Michael Hodges.   His last name was listed as his first name on the report, despite the fact that all of Zomans' identification papers were taken during the raid on his home.   Thus, it took his family weeks to locate him in the hospital.
The same medical report did not mention the fact that the back of Zomans' head was bashed in, or that he had electrical burn marks on the bottoms of his feet and genitals, or why he had lash marks across his back and chest.
Today Zoman lies in bed in a small home rented by his family in Baghdad.   Of course there has been no compensation provided to them for what was done to Sadiq Zoman.
Doctors, nurses, and medics complicit in torture
Such evidence that doctors, nurses, and medics have been complicit in torture and other illegal procedures in post-Saddam Iraq is already ample.
According to a Human Rights Watch report released on April 27th of this year, "Abu Ghraib was only the tip of the iceberg, it's now clear that abuse of detainees has happened all over-from Afghanistan to Guantánamo Bay to a lot of third-country dungeons where the United States has sent prisoners.   And probably quite a few other places we don't even know about."
The report adds, "Harsh and coercive interrogation techniques such as subjecting detainees to painful stress positions and extended sleep deprivation have been routinely used in detention centers throughout Iraq.
The earlier report of Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba found "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" constituting "systematic and illegal abuse of detainees" at Abu Ghraib.
Another Pentagon report documented 44 allegations of such war crimes at Abu Ghraib.   An ICRC report concluded that in military intelligence sections of Abu Ghraib, "methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel to obtain confessions and extract information."
Amnesty International has also released similar findings recently.
Most basic items such as analgesics, antibiotics, anesthetics and insulin
Another aspect I shall discuss here is the catastrophic situation of the health system in Iraq.   I've recently released a report on the condition of Iraq's hospitals under occupation.
Although the Iraq Ministry of Health is claimed to have gained its sovereignty and has received promises of over $1 Billion of US funding, hospitals in Iraq continue to face ongoing medicine, equipment, and staffing shortages under the US-led occupation.
During the 1990's, medical supplies and equipment were constantly in short supply because of the sanctions against Iraq.   And while war and occupation have brought promises of relief, hospitals have had little chance to recover and re-supply: the occupation, since its inception, has closely resembled a low-grade war, and the allocation of resources by occupation authorities has reflected this reality.
Thus, throughout Baghdad there are ongoing shortages of medicines of even the most basic items such as analgesics, antibiotics, anesthetics and insulin.   Surgical items are running out, as well as basic supplies like rubber gloves, gauze and medical tape.
Worse than even during the sanctions
In April 2004, an International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) report stated that hospitals in Iraq are overwhelmed with new patients, short of medicine and supplies and lack both adequate electricity and water, with ongoing bloodshed stretching the hospitals' already meager resources to the limit.
Ample testimony from medical practitioners in the interim in fact confirms this crisis.   A general practitioner at the prosthetics workshop at Al-Kena Hospital in Baghdad, Dr. Thamiz Aziz Abul Rahman, said, "Eleven months ago we submitted an emergency order for prosthetic materials to the Ministry of Health, and still we have nothing," said Dr. Rahman.   After a pause he added, "This is worse than even during the sanctions."
Dr. Qasim al-Nuwesri, the chief manager at Chuwader General Hospital, one of the two hospitals in the sprawling slum area of Sadr City, Baghdad, an area of nearly 2 million people, added that there, too, was a shortage of most supplies and, most critically, of ambulances.
Soldiers relax at the swimming pool at Camp Victory, in Baghdad, Iraq, June 2005. Photo: AP/Jacob Silberberg
Soldiers relax at the swimming pool
at Camp Victory, in Baghdad, Iraq, June 2005.
Lack of portable water — Receive 15% of needed amount
But for his hospital, the lack of potable water was the major problem.
"Of course we have typhoid, cholera, kidney stones — but we now even have the very rare Hepatitis Type-E — and it has become common in our area," said al-Nuwesri, while adding that they never faced these problems prior to the invasion of 2003.
Chuwader hospital needs at least 2000 liters of water per day to function with basic sterilization practices.   According to Dr. al-Nuwesri, they received 15% of this amount.
"The rest of the water is contaminated and causing problems, as are the electricity cuts," added al-Nuwesri, "Without electricity our instruments in the operating room cannot work and we have no pumps to bring us water."
At Fallujah General Hospital, Dr. Ahmed, who asked that only his first name be used because he feared US military reprisals said of the April 2004 siege that "the Americans shot out the lights in the front of our hospital.
They prevented doctors from reaching the emergency unit at the hospital, and we quickly began to run out of supplies and much needed medications."
He also said that several times Marines kept the physicians in the residence building, intentionally prohibiting them from entering the hospital in order to treat patients.
In November, shortly after razing Nazzal Emergency Hospital to the ground, US forces entered Fallujah General Hospital, the city's only healthcare facility for trauma victims, detaining employees and patients alike.
According to medics on the scene, water and electricity were "cut off," ambulances confiscated, and surgeons, without exception, kept out of the besieged city.
Wiam Mohammed, 4, was hit with a bullet in her left shoulder fleeing Fallujah April 2004 in a car with her parents, six brothers and sisters and a cousin. Her parents, two sisters and brother were killed when U.S. Marines opened fire on the car that was carrying them. Photo: AP/Abdel Kader Saadi April 19, 2004
Wiam Mohammed, 4, was hit with a bullet in her left shoulder fleeing Fallujah April 2004 in a car with her parents, six brothers and sisters and a cousin.
Her parents, two sisters and brother were killed when U.S. Marines opened fire on the car that was carrying them.
Many doctors in Iraq believe that, more widely, the lack of assistance, if not outright hostility, by the US military, coupled with the lack of rebuilding and reconstruction by foreign contractors has compounded the problems they are facing.
According to Agence France-Presse, the former ambassador of Iraq Paul Bremer admitted that the US led coalition spending on the Iraqi Health system was inadequate.
"It's not nearly enough to cover the needs in the healthcare field," said Bremer when referring to the amount of money the coalition was spending for the healthcare system in occupied Iraq.
When asked if his hospital had received assistance from the US military or reconstruction contractors, Dr. Sarmad Raheem, the administrator of chief doctors at Al-Kerkh Hospital in Baghdad said, "Never ever.
Some soldiers came here five months ago and asked what we needed.   We told them and they never brought us one single needle.   We heard that some people from the CPA came here, but they never did anything for us."
At Fallujah General Hospital, Dr. Mohammed said there has been virtually no assistance from foreign contractors, and of the US military he commented, "They send only bombs, not medicine."
International aid has been in short supply due primarily to the horrendous security situation in Iraq.   After the UN headquarters was bombed in Baghdad in August 2003, killing 20 people, aid agencies and non-governmental organizations either reduced their staffing or pulled out entirely.
Umm Ali, right, sits next to the bed of her 10 month-old son Ali Sabah, at Fallujah's public clinic, 60 kilometers west of Baghdad. Ali was wounded in a US attack on Fallujah. Photo: AP/Muhammed Muheisen, April 18, 2004

Umm Ali, right, sits next to the bed of her 10 month-old son Ali Sabah, at Fallujah's public clinic, 60 kilometers west of Baghdad.
Ali was wounded in a US coalition force attack

Dr. Amer Al Khuzaie, the Deputy Minister of Health of Iraq, blamed the medicine and equipment shortages on the US-led Coalition's failure to provide funds requested by the Ministry of Health.
"We have requested over $500 million for equipment and only have $300 million of this amount promised," he said, "Yet we still only have promises."
Defense contractors instead of Iraqis
According to The New York Times, "of the $18.4 billion Congress approved last fall, only about $600 million has actually been paid out.   Billions more have been designated for giant projects still in the planning stage.
Part of the blame rests with the Pentagon's planning failures and the occupation authority's reluctance to consult qualified Iraqis.
Instead, the administration brought in American defense contractors who had little clue about what was most urgently needed or how to handle the unfamiliar and highly insecure climate."
The World Health Organization (WHO) last year warned of a health emergency in Baghdad, as well as throughout Iraq if current conditions persist.
But despite claims from the Ministry of Health of more drugs, better equipment, and generalized improvement, doctors on the ground still see "no such improvement."
In conclusion, a quick summary of the overall situation on the ground in Iraq now is in order.   Over two years into the illegal occupation, while Iraq sits upon a sea of oil, ongoing gasoline shortages plague Iraqis who sometimes must wait 2 days to fill their cars.
Morgue workers cover the bodies of the dead as a family carries another victim on a coffin after a suicide bombing outside an Iraqi army recruiting center in Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, July 10, 2005. A suicide bomber blew himself up killing at least 14 and injuring more than 40 people. Photo: AP/Bilal Hussein
Morgue workers cover the bodies of the dead as a family carries another victim on a coffin after a suicide bombing outside an Iraqi army recruiting center in Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, July 10, 2005.
A suicide bomber blew himself up killing at least 14 and injuring more than 40 people.
Electricity remains in short supply.   Most of Iraq, including the northern region, receives on average 3 hours of electricity per day.
Even the better areas of Baghdad receive only 6-8 hours per day, forcing those who can afford them to use small generators to run fans and refrigerators in their homes.   Of course, this is only for those who've been able to obtain the now rarefied gasoline.
The security situation is, needless to say, horrendous.   With over 100,000 Iraqis killed thus far and the number of US soldiers killed approaching 2,000, the violence only continues to escalate.
Just since the new Iraqi government was sworn in at the end of April, over 1,000 Iraqis have died in their country, and this number is increasing as I speak to you right now.
This number will continue to escalate as the failed occupation grinds on, along with the number of dead occupation soldiers.
As the heavy handed tactics of the US military persist, the Iraqi resistance continues to grow in it's numbers and lethality.
As I mentioned before, potable water remains in short supply.
Raw sewage, Cholera, typhoid
Cholera, typhoid and other water-borne disease are rampant even in parts of the capital city as lack of reconstruction continues to plague Iraq's infrastructure.
Raw sewage is common throughout not just Baghdad, but other cities throughout Iraq.
With over 50% unemployment, a growing resistance and an infrastructure in shambles, the future for Iraq remains bleak as long as the failed occupation persists.
While the Bush Administration continues to disregard calls for a timetable for withdrawal, Iraqis continue to suffer and die with little hope for their future.
With each passing day, the catastrophe in Iraq resembles the US debacle in Vietnam more and more.
It has become clear that the only way the Bush Administration will withdraw the US military from Iraq and provide Iraq with true sovereignty is if they are forced to do so.
       More World Tribunal below      
Ken Livingstone:   You are obviously referring to the views of Sheik Qaradawi who denounces suicide bombing anywhere in the world but does not denounce it in Israel and the point he makes and I don't agree with it, the point he makes is that the Palestinians don't have the guns and the tanks and the jet fighters to fight the Israeli.
They only have their bodies.
Now I don't think that justifies suicide bombing.
But if you have been under foreign occupation and denied the right to vote, denied the right to your own affairs, often denied the right to work, for three generations, I suspect if it had happened here in England, we would have produced a lot of suicide bombers ourselves.
BBC Today:   Isn't there a danger though as soon as you recognize that and you don't immediately say what you should be following is the political path, that you are letting people...it is an acknowledgement...I understand the thinking behind that...I understand the reasoning.
Ken Livingstone:   All my life I've told people, "Don't use violence.   You pursue that political part."
But it is a lot easier to say that here in Britain where we have the right to vote, where we have free trade unions, then it is in a situation where you are the Palestinians, where you have no right to vote and you have been under occupation for now nearly forty years.
            
Ken Livingstone speaking with BBC Today
Wednesday July 20 2005 — transcript by TheWE.cc
British footballer David Beckham (C) hugs London Mayor Ken Livingstone following the announement that the British capital will host the 2012 Olympic Games.
London pulled off a stunning come-from-behind victory to beat Paris and win the 2012 Olympics.
BBC Today:   Just weeks before the London bombings the British Intelligence documents warned that what was going on in Iraq was fuelling terrorist related activity in Britain.
But it claimed that there was no group that either intended or was capable of attacking Britain.
On July 7th, that was proved wrong.
We are joined for his first interview with us since the bombing, by the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone.
Of course these things are easy with hindsight, but did you feel a sense of frustration when you heard that intelligence assessment that there was no group either that intended or was capable of attacking Britain?
Ken Livingstone:   Well, I assume — because I haven't seen this assessment — that it simple means they hadn't discovered them. What was particularly disturbing about the bombers in London was they had just hadn't come up on any of the intelligence radar.
WE do track literally hundreds and hundreds of people who may become a threat, or say injudicious things and might have that potential.
This was the fear we had always had.
That there would be a home grown who weren't linked in, and hadn't been picked up, and they would kill.
Sebastion Coe, right, two-time Olympic gold medalist and leader of London's winning 2012 Olympic bid, with London Mayor Ken Livingstone, left, address the crowd in London's Trafalgar Square, Thursday July 14, 2005, during a vigil to pay homage to the victims of last week's bomb attacks on the capital which claimed at least 53 lives.
BBC Today:   Do you think the fact that they were home grown rather disproves something that you said since the bombings, that London is proof of people living in unity and harmony?
Ken Livingstone:   If you look at what happened in Holland after the terrible incidents there, the backlash and the violence that there was, or in other parts of the world where whole communities turn upon each other, I think Londoners just weren't going to be divided.
We are not stupid.
Those bombs are there to create a backlash, to fuel intercommunal violence, and that becomes a recruiting ground for terrorists.
I was particularly impressed by the vigil we had, how as Sir Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain moved towards the microphone, thousands and thousands of people just started to applaud before he even said anything, because they are not going to be divided.
London Mayor Ken Livingstone prepares to board an Underground train during the morning rush hour in London July 11, 2005.
BBC Today:   What do you think motivated these men?
Ken Livingstone:   I think you have just had eighty years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of a Western need for oil.
We've propped up unsavoury governments.
We've overthrown those we didn't consider sympathetic.
And I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the nineteen-eighties we funded — I say we — the Americans recruited and trained bin-Laden, and taught him how to kill and make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians and drive them out of Afghanistan.
They didn't give any thought to the fact that once he had done that he might turn on his creators.
London Mayor Ken Livingstone travels on an Underground train during the morning rush hour in London, July 11, 2005.
BBC Today:   So we are to blame?
Ken Livingstone:   I haven't the slightest doubt.
If at the end of World War 1, we had done what we promised the Arabs, which was to let them be free, have their own government, and kept out of Arab affairs and just bought their oil rather than feeling we have to control the flow of oil, I suspect this would not have arisen.
You have watched as I have watched Western governments so terrified of losing control of their fuel supplies, that all my life there has been interventions in the Middle East by Western governments.
BBC Today:   But it is an extraordinary claim though to say that because of British and American foreign policy over oil we are now in a situation where British born people, born and bred here, are bombing London.
Ken Livingstone:   It's the double standards that flow from that.
We initially welcomed Saddam Hussein to power.
Our intelligence services gave him lists of trade unionists and communists from the CIA that we wanted killed.
He then turned on us,
And you have also got this running sore of the Palestine and Israeli conflict.
I think a lot of young people see that, see the double standards, see what happens in Guantanamo Bay, and there just think there isn't a just foreign policy.
Poor Israel ... Under enormous US pressures !!! Image: www.aljazeerah.info/Nihad Awartani, Ad Dustour, 7/20/05
Poor Israel ... Under enormous US pressures !!!
London Mayor Ken Livingstone stands with Iqbal Sacranie, Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, as they observe a two-minute silence in memory of the victims of the London bombings in London's Trafalgar Square, July 14, 2005. Photo: Stephen Hird/Reuters
London Mayor Ken Livingstone stands with Iqbal Sacranie, Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, as they observe a two-minute silence in memory of the victims of the London bombings in London's Trafalgar Square, July 14, 2005.
BBC Today:   Are you saying in a sense that you understand why these men did this?
Ken Livingstone:   Understand is a term that is used as an expression of sympathy.
And I don't have any sympathy for this because my broad view is, not my broad view, my underlying principals is killing people is wrong.
I didn't oppose capital punishment decade after decade then to turn around and say it is alright when suicide bombers blow people up.
But you see I don't just denounce the suicide bombers.
I denounce those governments that use indiscriminate slaughter to advance their foreign policy as we have occasionally seen with the Israeli government bombing areas from which a terrorist group will have come, irrespective of the casualties of innocent women and children and men.
London Mayor Ken Livingstone rides the train on his way to his office in City Hall, London, on the Jubilee line from Willesden Green Monday July 11, 2005.
BBC Today:   Do you denounce suicide bombing wherever it is or do you draw a distinction between a suicide bomb in London and one in Israel?
Ken Livingstone:   I have always said I do not support any suicide bombing.
I don't actually ever recall supporting an act of violence.
I think that is one of the things that allows me to be able to deal with politicians who have got a double standard.
Going though the nineteen-eighties I was always being asked to denounce the violence of the IRA and I said I would denounce all the violence in Northern Ireland.
I am not going to just pick on one group when so many are doing the killing.
BBC Today:   But there is the problem isn't there that when people give a slightly mixed message about perhaps suicide bombings carried out by Palestinians, that it sends a message to young men, British men who are angry about what they see going on in the Middle East that perhaps it might be acceptable to go and blow up a bomb in Israel,
Ken Livingstone:   You are obviously referring to the views of Sheik Qaradawi who denounces suicide bombing anywhere in the world but does not denounce it in Israel and the point he makes and I don't agree with it, the point he makes is that the Palestinians don't have the guns and the tanks and the jet fighters to fight the Israeli.   They only have their bodies.   Now I don't think that justifies suicide bombing.
BBC Today:   But if you have been under foreign occupation and denied the right to vote, denied the right to your own affairs, often denied the right to work, for three generations, I suspect if it had happened here in England, we would have produced a lot of suicide bombers ourselves.
Isn't there a danger though as soon as you recognize that and you don't immediately say what you should be following is the political path, that you are letting people...it is an acknowledgement...I understand the thinking behind that...I understand the reasoning.
Ken Livingstone:   All my life I've told people, "Don't use violence You pursue that political part."
But it is a lot easier to say that here in Britain where we have the right to vote, where we have free trade unions, then it is in a situation where you are the Palestinians, where you have no right to vote and you have been under occupation for now nearly forty years.
BBC Today:   But you end up with the situation given what you are saying — I don't know if you have seen the front page of the Telegraph today — under the headline, 'The men who blame Britain' there is a photograph of you between Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed and Anjem Choudary.
Ken Livingstone:   Yes, I am photographed with hundreds and hundreds of people every month.   Where ever I go people want me to have a photograph but it doesn't mean that I agree with them.
And I have to say as well that I do regret the fact that the British media, or some of them, pick on the most minority strand amongst the Muslim community.   People whose followers are numbered in tens not even hundreds and elevate them to the front page as though these are the leading figures of the Muslim community in Britain,
We have three quarters of a million Muslims in this city, in London, and three or four totally unrepresented individuals are always stuck on the front page.
Some of them are serial fantasists.   It's like saying that the wonderful character, E L Wisty of Peter Cook, who was the sole member of the world domination league, represented the English people.   It is nonsense.
BBC Today:   Ken Livingston thank you.

Wednesday, July 13th, 2005
Before London Bombing, Leaked UK Memo Warned Iraq War a Key Cause for Growth of "Extremism" in Britain
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British police now believe that four-British-born men carried out last week's deadly bombings in London that killed at least 52 people and injured 700.
Police said all four men are of Pakistani descent and at least three are believed to have died in the explosions.
The four suspected bombers were aged between 19 and 30 and were so-called "cleanskins" — with no convictions or known connections to terrorist organizations.
Police first learned of the four men when the family of one of them called the police last week to report their 22-year-old son, Hasib Hussain, was missing.
Closed circuit television film from around 8.30am the day of the bombings shows four young men, all wearing identical large rucksacks similar to those carried by infantry soldiers.   The three subway bombs went off 20 minutes later.
Police said personal documents belonging to three of the men were later found at three blast sites.   Police have not recovered any timing devices at the bomb sites and it is possible that all four men blew themselves up deliberately.
Police raided six homes in and near the northern industrial town of Leeds on Tuesday and arrested a relative of one of the suspects.   The relative was brought to London for questioning.   The raids led police to a bomb factory in Leeds.   Explosives were also found in a car at Luton railway station.
Meanwhile, British home secretary, Charles Clarke, today warned that Britain must be prepared for more attacks.   He said, "We have to assume there are others who are ready to do the kinds of things that these people did last Thursday."   Britain remains on its highest-ever security alert.
Prime Minister Tony Blair's office said on Tuesday there was no link between last week's bombings in London and the Iraq war.
In the House of Commons a day earlier, Blair rejected a suggestion that Britain was more at risk from a terrorist attack because of its involvement in Iraq.   Blair said, "It is a form of terrorism aimed at our way of life, not at any particular government or policy."
AMY GOODMAN:    Well, not everyone agrees.   In the aftermath of the bombings last week, CNN's Christiane Amanpour was reporting live from the streets of London when her broadcast was interrupted.
    CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: You know the reaction of the British people was the reaction of the British people.   These are people who have gone through terror, war bombings, the Nazi bombings of World War II, known then as the Blitz, and here we go, we have the British people intervening right here in —
    LONDONER: Tell the truth about why this war happened! Don’t touch my bike! Tell the truth about what happened here!   We’re in Iraq.   That's why.   That's why it happened.
    CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Thank you.
    LONDONER: There were fifty killed in Iraq.
    CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: As you can tell, and this is actually important, you are seeing a live version of what is aggravating a lot of people here in England and around the world.

AMY GOODMAN:    That was Christiane Amanpour on CNN reporting from the streets of London last week, being interrupted live on the air, a man saying, “It's about Iraq.”   We go now to Britain to speak with Milan Rai, author of Regime Unchanged and War Plan Iraq, one of the founders of the Voices In The Wilderness, U.K.   He is currently coordinating the group, Justice, Not Vengeance and has been doing extensive analysis of the aftermath of the London bombings.   He joins us on the phone from Hastings, England.   Welcome to Democracy Now!
MILAN RAI:    Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN:    Can you talk about the latest news, what the police are saying now in Britain about the four young British men of Pakistani descent?
MILAN RAI:    Well, there are a lot of reports about them, the four young men.   There are extensive profiles in the British press of the young men and their backgrounds and the disbelief in their neighborhoods and their communities that these young men, who apparently gave no sign of having strong political views, have carried out these terrible atrocities.
The most striking thing about the coverage is that there's one very big element which is missing.
On Sunday, the Sunday Times had a front page story about a secret Home Office / Foreign Office joint report entitled, “Young Muslims and Extremism,” which was a report into why young Muslims in Britain were becoming more and more inclined to support and perhaps to participate in terrorist actions both in Britain and abroad.
And one of the conclusions of that report, which was given to the Prime Minister last year, was, and I'm reading from the Sunday Times, “The Iraq war is identified by the dossier as a key cause of young Britons' turning to terrorism, the analysis says,” — now it's quoting from the report itself —
“’It seems that a particularly strong cause of disillusionment among Muslims, including young Muslims, is a perceived double standard in the foreign policy of western governments, in particular Britain and U.S.’”
And It goes on quoting from the report, “’The perception is that passive oppression, as demonstrated in British foreign policy, e.g., non-action on Kashmir and Chechnya, has given way to active oppression, the war on terror and in Iraq and Afghanistan, are all seen by a section of British Muslims as having been acts against Islam.’”
So, that's all quotations from the Sunday Times and from a secret government report which has been leaked to the Sunday Times.
It goes right to the heart of the issue, which is gripping the country today, which is dominating news coverage.
It's an authoritative report by the government's two main departments concerned with terrorism, Home Office and Foreign Office.
And it is not there in the media, it's not there in the newspapers.
It's been barely referred to since the Sunday Times splashed it on the front page.
The Sunday Times led on the fact there were British recruits to the al Qaeda network, and those two paragraphs I have just read were not picked up anywhere else in the newspaper.
No other newspaper has picked up anywhere else in the newspaper.   No other newspaper has picked up on those conclusions.
There have been a couple of references to the report and the fact that, you know, the Home Office and Foreign Office found that there were some British recruits, home grown recruits to the al Qaeda networks, but the crucial conclusion that this is to do with British foreign policy is just absent from the reporting that's going on right now.
AMY GOODMAN:    Milan Rai, author of Regime Unchanged.   In the piece in the Times of London on Sunday, at the very end of the piece, it says the former Scotland Yard chief who retired earlier this year said on one weekend, more than a thousand undercover officers have been deployed monitoring a group of suspected terrorists.
Can you talk about what is happening right now in the Muslim community and among Muslim students in Britain?
MILAN RAI:    Well, there's a great sense of fear.   There are security operations going on.
Young Muslim men are not on the streets because of the level of fear that there is right now.
It's very, very frightening what's happening in terms of the mood turning against the Muslim community as a whole.
A poll in the Telegraph found a few days ago that one in five people in Britain believes that Islam itself, not Islamic fundamentalism or al Qaeda or anything like that, but Islam itself, one in five people in Britain thinks that Islam itself is a major threat to British democracy, and that's a very frightening base for repressive action and for a lot of people turning the other way when repressive action is taken.
The same poll found that basically half of the people in Britain thought that Islam itself was some kind of a threat to Western democracy.
And so people in Muslim communities around Britain are very, very worried.
There's a real sense that a lot of people in Britain are waiting for the security forces and the police to come down heavy on the Muslim community, and that is bound to create more grievances, bound to create more alienation, bound to create more young men like the ones who have carried out this atrocity.
AMY GOODMAN:    Milan Rai, over the weekend, a report was leaked in Britain and also we reported it here, about a timetable that had been set up of British and U.S. troops, allied troops, pulling out of Iraq.   Did you see that, and it's interesting it came out just after the bombing?
MILAN RAI:    It is interesting.   I mean, the thing about withdrawing from Iraq is the question is where — what is happening to those troops and what the conditions are for it?
If — the strategy has always been in relation to Iraq that to do what in the 1960s and 1970s in Indochina was called the “Vietnamization of the conflict” and to minimize the political costs of the war by reducing the exposure of Western troops, and trying to get Iraqi security forces who will bear the brunt of the retaliation from the population from the fact that Iraq is still under foreign control, whatever the modus operandi is for maintaining control.
So, you know, withdrawals from Iraq have always been on the cards, and it's also been on the cards to retain some troops there.
So, if you have Western troops in highly protected zones, and the Iraqis out there actually taking the brunt of it, then you can maintain foreign control with minimal military and, therefore, they hope, political costs attached to that.
And that kind of a strategy has worked to a certain extent in certain places, and it's up to people who are concerned for the Iraqi people to create the greatest possible political costs regardless of the level of risk to British and U.S. soldiers.
It's up to people who are caring about the risk to the Iraqi people to try and increase the political cost of the occupation.
AMY GOODMAN:    We played that clip of Christiane Amanpour reporting live from the streets of London after the bombing and the man coming up and interrupting and saying, “It's about Iraq.   It's about Iraq.”
How much of that is discussed on your blog, “London blasts pressuring the media.”   You talk about the media coverage of this.
MILAN RAI:    Well, it's a very mixed picture.   One of the curious things that came up in the last few days was a former conservative M.P. who now writes for the Times as a journalist, Matthew Parris, saying that in his very conservative circles, a lot of people are saying, you know, “Obviously, it's to do with Iraq.”
So, I think there is this general perception that people recognize that the war in Iraq has contributed to anger, which has had a partial expression, which has contributed to these terrible atrocities in London.   I think there's a general recognition of that.
And there were, you know, conservatives who were warning about these consequences before the war in Iraq.
A quote which has not appeared in the newspapers, I think because it's so sensitive, but former Chancellor of the Exchequer for the Conservatives, Kenneth Clarke, said — before the invasion of Iraq, he said, “When a bomb goes off in a Western city in the future, how much will this policy, invading Iraq, have contributed to it?”
And he gave that warning way back in March, 2003, and there were a lot of people who were feeling that way, and there are a lot of people now on all sides of the political divide who feel that what was done to Iraq, what is being done now to Iraq has contributed to this.
Obviously, the Justice, Not Vengeance position is that we totally condemn terrorist actions.
What we want to see is Britain reducing its participation in and support for injustice in the world, like the invasion and occupation of Iraq, like Britain's refusal to put pressure on Israel over Israeli policies towards the Palestinians.
Britain's sucking up to Russia about its policies in Chechnya where Britain has offered a lot of diplomatic support to President Putin.
If we do those things, we should do them because they are the right thing to do, and we also know that doing the right thing will increase our security because despite all of the people saying that this has nothing to do with Iraq and so on and so forth, the people who have actually studied al Qaeda, like Michael Scheuer, who used to run the bin Laden unit for the C.I.A. from 1996 to 1999, he has said very clearly — he is one of the experts in the C.I.A. about bin Laden.
He resigned last November.   What he said very, very clearly is, “If you say this has got nothing to do with our foreign policy, or if you say that al Qaeda has no realizable political demands, you are wrong.”
And what he says is that bin Laden has clear, focused and widely popular foreign policy goals.
And they are to do with ending U.S. support for Israel, ending U.S. support for the repressive regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and so on and so forth, ending U.S. and British support for Russian oppression in Chechnya, Indian oppression in Kashmir, and so on and so forth.
These are real grievances which are felt by millions of people around the world.
And bin Laden uses those grievances to recruit and to incite, and if those grievances weren't there, then whatever he himself would like to do, the pool of volunteers would dry up, the pool of finance would dry up, and that would make us safer.
We should do it because it's the right thing, but it's also the way to make us safer.
We have summed that up in the phrase, “Counter Terror, Build Justice.”
AMY GOODMAN:    We're talking to Milan Rai, author of Regime Unchanged, as well as War Plan Iraq, also one of the founders of Voices In the Wilderness, U.K.
The BBC Is just reporting about Prime Minister Tony Blair calling for new laws to tackle extremism.   He says, in a worldwide drive to tackle the, quote, “evil ideology behind the London bombings.”
Blair said there would be profound shock and anxiety at the news the suspected suicide bombers were British.
Talks are beginning on bringing in new laws covering preparations for attacks, making it easier to deport people trying to, quote, “incite hatred,” he told M.P.s.
He said the moderate and true voice of Islam has to be mobilized.
Blair said there was a need and a willingness to act, and consultations are beginning in the next couple of weeks over possible new anti-terror legislation due to be published in the autumn.
The laws would focus on measures the police and security services believe there were needed to combat the incitement and the instigation of terrorism, as well as the acts of terrorism themselves.
He — the laws involving — well, in this country, the U.S. Congress is taking on issues like these right now.
In fact, the Congress is weighing whether to stop the sunsetting of laws in the USA PATRIOT Act, parts of that act, that would involve, for example, the saving of text messages, internet companies saving emails for years.
Can you talk about the issue of these laws and how they're being received by the British public?
MILAN RAI:    Well, there is enormous support, overwhelming support in Britain, a poll discovered yesterday, for new police powers.
There is a widespread acceptance of the idea that the police should have the powers necessary to catch people who carry out these acts and prevent them from happening.
So, that's a fact.   That's how people feel.
Now, does that actually add up?   Will these powers actually help to prevent these kinds of actions from taking place?
Well, what we’re seeing so far with the anti-terrorist legislation in this country is as the human rights group, Liberty, reported last year, what we have seen is that they have been used against the Muslim community in this country in a way that is so heavy-handed and so biased that it's effectively criminalized much of the community.
And that creates alienation.   That creates disaffection.
That creates people who feel no allegiance to the rest of society.
That creates people who are willing to kill their fellow citizens.   That contributes to that kind of a mood.
So I'm very, very worried by the moves that are taking place now.
Curiously, there have been reports, off the record, from ministers saying that we shouldn't rush into legislation.
Some ministers quoted as saying, I think we have gone too far already in anti-terrorist legislation.
I think Tony Blair is very much in the driving seat of this.
He is using these police and intelligence services as a smokescreen, saying, “We will do what they recommend.”
What he does is he tells them what he wants, and then hears a recommendation and then he goes ahead.
I think he is brushing aside the concerns of his fellow ministers who are worried about the impact of this legislation and the way it will be implemented on Muslim communities and what that’s going to do in the future.
And I'm afraid that what we're seeing is the very worst aspects of Tony Blair's personality and approach to politics coming out.
And it's kind of indicating quite a dark future, really, unless it can be resisted.
AMY GOODMAN:    Milan Rai, author of Regime Unchanged and War Plan Iraq. one of the founders of Voices In The Wilderness, U.K., and Justice, Not Vengeance.   Can you give your website?
MILAN RAI:    Our website is www.JusticeNotVengeance.org, which also shortens to J-N-V.org.
AMY GOODMAN:    Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Milan Rai.
MILAN RAI:    Thank you very much.
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The Sunday Times - Britain
July 10, 2005
Robert Winnett and David Leppard
Leaked No 10 dossier reveals Al-Qaeda’s British recruits
AL-QAEDA is secretly recruiting affluent, middle-class Muslims in British universities and colleges to carry out terrorist attacks in this country, leaked Whitehall documents reveal.
A network of “extremist recruiters” is circulating on campuses targeting people with “technical and professional qualifications”, particularly engineering and IT degrees.
Yesterday it emerged that last week’s London bombings were a sophisticated attack with all the devices detonating on the Underground within 50 seconds of each other.   The police believe those behind the outrage may be home-grown British terrorists with no criminal backgrounds and possessing technical expertise.
A joint Home Office and Foreign Office dossier — Young Muslims and Extremism — prepared for the prime minister last year, said Britain might now be harbouring thousands of Al-Qaeda sympathisers.
Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan police chief, revealed separately last night that up to 3,000 British-born or British-based people had passed through Osama Bin Laden’s training camps.
The Whitehall dossier, ordered by Tony Blair following last year’s train bombings in Madrid, says: “Extremists are known to target schools and colleges where young people may be very inquisitive but less challenging and more susceptible to extremist reasoning/ arguments.”
The confidential assessment, covering more than 100 pages of letters, papers and other documents, forms the basis of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy, codenamed Operation Contest.
It paints a chilling picture of the scale of the task in tackling terrorism.   Drawing on information from MI5, it concludes: “Intelligence indicates that the number of British Muslims actively engaged in terrorist activity, whether at home or abroad or supporting such activity, is extremely small and estimated at less than 1%.”
This equates to fewer than 16,000 potential terrorists and supporters out of a Muslim population of almost 1.6m.
The dossier also estimates that 10,000 have attended extremist conferences.   The security services believe that the number who are prepared to commit terrorist attacks may run into hundreds.
Most of the Al-Qaeda recruits tend to be loners “attracted to university clubs based on ethnicity or religion” because of “disillusionment with their current existence”.   British-based terrorists are made up of different ethnic groups, according to the documents.
“They range from foreign nationals now naturalised and resident in the UK, arriving mainly from north Africa and the Middle East, to second and third generation British citizens whose forebears mainly originate from Pakistan or Kashmir.
“In addition . . . a significant number come from liberal, non-religious Muslim backgrounds or (are) only converted to Islam in adulthood.   These converts include white British nationals and those of West Indian extraction.”
The Iraq war is identified by the dossier as a key cause of young Britons turning to terrorism.   The analysis says: “It seems that a particularly strong cause of disillusionment among Muslims, including young Muslims, is a perceived ‘double standard’ in the foreign policy of western governments, in particular Britain and the US.
“The perception is that passive ‘oppression’, as demonstrated in British foreign policy, eg non-action on Kashmir and Chechnya, has given way to ‘active oppression’.   The war on terror, and in Iraq and Afghanistan, are all seen by a section of British Muslims as having been acts against Islam.”
In an interview yesterday, Blair denied that the London terrorist attacks were a direct result of British involvement in the Iraq war.   He said Russia had suffered terrorism with the Beslan school massacre despite its opposition to the war, and terrorists were planning further attacks on Spain even after the pro-war government was voted out.
“September 11 happened before Iraq, before Afghanistan, before any of these issues and that was the worst terrorist atrocity of all,” he said.
However, the analysis prepared for Blair identified Iraq as a “recruiting sergeant” for extremism.
The Sunday Times has learnt that Britain is negotiating with Australia to hand over military command of southern Iraq to release British troops for redeployment in Afghanistan.
The plan behind Operation Contest has been to win over Muslim “hearts and minds” with policy initiatives including anti-religious discrimination laws.   A meeting of Contest officials this week is expected to consider a radical overhaul of the strategy following the London attacks.
Stevens said last night at least eight attacks aimed at civilian targets on the British mainland had been foiled in the past five years and that none had been planned by the same gang.
The former Scotland Yard chief, who retired earlier this year, said that on one weekend more than 1,000 undercover officers had been deployed, monitoring a group of suspected terrorists.
He said that he believed last week’s attackers were almost certainly British-born, “brought up here and totally aware of British life and values”.
“There’s a sufficient number of people in this country willing to be Islamic terrorists that they don’t have to be drafted in from abroad,” he said.
Copyright 2005   Times Newspapers Ltd.
 
 
Published on Friday, July 8, 2005 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Blair's Alliance with Bush Bombed
by Robert Fisk
"If you bomb our cities," Osama bin Laden said in a recent videotape, "we will bomb yours."
It was clear Britain would be a target ever since British Prime Minister Tony Blair decided to join President Bush's "war on terror" and his invasion of Iraq.
We had, as they say, been warned.
The G-8 summit was obviously chosen, well in advance, as Attack Day.
Trying to get us to withdraw from Iraq
It's no use Blair telling us, "They will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear."
They are not trying to destroy "what we hold dear."
They are trying to get public opinion to force Blair to withdraw from Iraq, out of his alliance with the United States, out of his adherence to Bush's policies in the Middle East.
The Spanish paid the price for their support for Bush — and Spain's subsequent retreat from Iraq proved that the Madrid bombings achieved their objectives — while the Australians were made to suffer in Bali.
It is easy for Blair to call yesterday's bombings "barbaric"' — they were — but what were the civilian deaths of the Anglo American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the children torn apart by cluster bombs, the innocent Iraqis gunned down at American military checkpoints.
Collateral damage?
When they die, it is "collateral damage"; when "we" die it is "barbaric terrorism."
If we are fighting insurgency in Iraq what makes us believe insurgency won't come to us?
One thing is certain:  If Blair really believes that by "fighting terrorism" in Iraq we could more efficiently protect Britain, this argument is no longer valid.
To time these bombs with the G-8 summit, when the world was concentrating on Britain, was not a stroke of genius.
You don't need a Ph.D. to choose another Bush-Blair handshake to close down a capital city with explosives and massacre its citizens.
The G-8 summit was announced so far in advance that he gave the bombers all the time they needed to prepare.
A coordinated system of attacks of the kind we saw yesterday takes weeks to plan; we can forget the idiotic fantasy these were timed to coincide with the Olympic decision.
Bin Laden and his supporters don't set up an operation like this on the off chance that France will lose its bid to host the Games.
Al-Qaida does not play football.
No, this would have taken months — to choose safe houses, prepare explosives, identify targets, ensure security, choose the bombers, to plan the communications.
Coordination and sophisticated planning — and the usual utter indifference toward the lives of the innocent — are characteristic of al-Qaida.
Let us reflect on the fact that yesterday — the opening of the G-8 — represented a total failure of our security services.
These are the same intelligence "experts" who claim there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when there were none but who utterly failed to uncover a months-long plot to kill Londoners.
Trains, planes, buses, cars, metros.  Transportation appears to be the science of al-Qaida's dark arts.
3 million London commuters
No one can search 3 million London commuters every day.
No one can stop every tourist.
Then come the Muslims of Britain, who have long been awaiting this nightmare.
Now every one of our Muslims becomes the usual suspect, the man or woman with brown eyes, the man with the beard, the woman in the scarf, the boy with the worry beads, the girl who says she's been racially abused.
I remember, crossing the Atlantic on 9/11 — my plane turned around off Ireland when the United States closed its airspace — how the aircraft purser and I toured the cabins to see if we could identify any suspicious passengers.
I found about a dozen, of course, totally innocent men who had brown eyes or long beards or who looked at me with "hostility."
And sure enough, in just a few seconds, bin Laden turned nice, liberal, friendly Robert into an anti-Arab racist.
And this is part of the point of yesterday's bombings: to divide British Muslims from British non-Muslims (let us not mention the name Christians), to encourage the very kind of racism that Blair claims to resent.
But here's the problem.
Blair has locked us into
To go on pretending that Britain's enemies want to destroy "what we hold dear" encourages racism; what we are confronting here is a specific, direct, centralized attack on London as a result of a "war on terror" that Blair has locked us into.
Just before the U.S. presidential elections, bin Laden asked: "Why do we not attack Sweden?"
Lucky Sweden.
No Osama bin Laden there.
And no Tony Blair.
Robert Fisk writes for The Independent in London
© 2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
 Common Dreams © 1997-2005 
July 8, 2005
Blowback Hits Britain
Londoners Pay Heavy Price for Blair's Deception
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
D o you feel safer now that George Bush's and Tony Blair's barbaric attacks on Iraq have brought barbaric attacks to London?
Coordinated attacks on London's transport system have apparently killed 38 and injured 700. It is a terrible thing but hardly surprising.
Did Londoners really think that the British people would not be held accountable for electing and reelecting Tony Blair -- a war criminal under the Nuremberg standard -- who aided and abetted George Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq on false pretenses?
Did Londoners really believe that Muslims would have no response to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the slaughter, torture, and detention of Muslims?
Blair and Bush are on their high horses claiming the morality of "civilized nations" and denouncing the retaliation they have provoked as "barbarism."
Their hypocrisy plays poorly in the world.
Far more innocent Iraqi civilians, especially women and children, have been slaughtered than British and Americans.
Why do Bush and Blair believe they should be praised for slaughtering civilians and only Muslims denounced?
Why do Americans think it is heroic and honorable for our troops to massacre Iraqis with bombs, missiles, gunships, tanks, and heavy machine guns, but cowardly and barbaric when our victims fight back in the only way they can?
The US and Britain started this fight, not Iraq.
We should be ashamed that Bush and Blair deceived us, tricked us into a pointless and unjust war, and that innocent people on both sides are paying with their lives and limbs for Bush's and Blair's lies.
Our real anger should be directed at Bush and Blair who are responsible for the deaths and destruction.
Immoral leaders
The American and British people had better wake up, depose their immoral leaders, and put a halt to this war.
There are 1.3 billion Muslims.
The Iraqi insurgency has proved that Muslims are not intimidated by a "superpower."
Unless the American and British people want a 30-year or a 100-year war with domestic police states for "security" reasons and a draft that will bleed their populations dry, this war needs to be wound up quickly with due apologies and reparations.
No more bluster and heroic talk from the two war criminals.
The war is breeding terrorism and cannot be won.
Only an even-handed diplomacy that breeds trust and ceases to rule Muslims with puppet governments can isolate and reduce terrorist acts.
Muslims are not a few scattered Indian tribes with no place to hide who can be exterminated.
America has no chance of imposing its will on the Muslim world.
Muslims have their own will.
As long as Bush continues to operate with Mao's belief that power comes out of the barrel of a gun, terrorism will prosper and people will die for no reason except their refusal to hold corrupt leaders accountable.
Paul Craig Roberts served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration.  His graduate economics education was at the University of Virginia, the University of California at Berkeley, and Oxford University.

Ludicrous Diversion - 7/7 London Bombings Documentary

On the 7th of July 2005 London was hit by a series of explosions.
There were calls for an impartial inquiry which have been rejected by the British Labour govenment.
Tony Blair described such an inquiry as a ‘ludicrous diversion’.
What don’t they want us to find out?
You probably think you know what happened that day.
But you don’t.
       Ludicrous Diversion - 7/7 London Bombings Documentary      
       Click here     
       Last time we checked this was still allowed     
       UK War Crimes      
       UK Terror State — Downing Street Memo — How Bush and Blair took us all for a ride      
       War Criminals:  Blair, Brown, Campbell, Goldsmith, Hoon, Straw      
Alex Jones End Game. Photo: prisonplanet.tv
Alex Jones End Game. Photo: prisonplanet.tv
Alex Jones End Game. Photo: prisonplanet.tv
Alex Jones End Game. Photo: prisonplanet.tv
Click on image to help Alex and for high quality video
EndGame — Alex Jones, you have done the world a great favor
It has taken me until now to view this great masterpiece that chronicles the planet's true history
But I am glad for this delay as my awareness of reality, and the events that seemingly must unfold to educate humankind, have come from sentience off planet — now with this movie the circles merge
A movie par excellence, it will likely be considered the most significant in the downfall of the rich and powerful who control the world and rising politicians already in their pocket — the imprisonment of all those who seek to bring forth this horror, this enslavement of 'New World Order'
Kewe
Alex Jones End Game. Photo: prisonplanet.tv
US destroyed Fallujah as it tries to destroy the rest of Iraq
Published on Monday, July 4, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
by Sheldon Drobny
Justice O'Connor's decision in Bush v. Gore led to the current Bush administration's execution of war crimes and atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places in the Middle East that are as egregious as those committed by the Third Reich and other evil governments in human history.
The lesson is clear.
Those people who may be honorable and distinguished in their chosen profession should always make decisions based upon good rather than evil no matter where their nominal allegiances may rest.
Justice O'Connor was quoted to have said something to the affect that she abhorred the thought of Bush losing the 2000 election to Gore.
She was known to have wanted to retire after the 2000 election for same reason she is now retiring.
She wanted to spend more time with her sick husband.
Unfortunately, she tarnished her distinguished career with the deciding vote in Bush v. Gore by going along with the partisan majority of the Court to interfere with a democratic election that she and the majority feared would be lost in an honest recount.
She dishonored herself and the Supreme Court by succumbing to party allegiances and not The Constitution to which she swore to uphold.
And the constitutional argument she and the majority used to justify their decision was the Equal Protection Clause.
The Equal Protection Clause was the ultimate basis for the decision, but the majority essentially admitted (what was obvious in any event) that it was not basing its conclusion on any general view of what equal protection requires.
The decision in Bush v Gore was not dictated by the law in any sense—either the law found through research, or the law as reflected in the kind of intuitive sense that comes from immersion in the legal culture.
The Equal Protection clause is generally used in matters concerning civil rights.
The majority ignored their basic conservative views supporting federalism and states' rights in order to justify their decision.
History will haunt these justices down for their utter lack of justice and the hypocrisy associated with this decision.
Sheldon Drobny is Co-founder of Air America Radio.
       Bush v. Gore      
       Appointment of U.S. President by the U.S. Supreme Court      
       — Raw political clout exercised by US Supreme Court    
Unspeakable grief and horror
ÇáäÊÇÆÌ ÇáÃæáíÉ ááÍá ÇáÃãíÑßí ÇáÍÐÑ ááãÞÇæãÉ ÇáÚÑÇÞíÉ Ýí ÇáÝáæÌÉ (ÇáÌÒíÑÉ)
                        ...and the circus of deception killing continues...
Most recent 'Circus of Killing' click here
— 2009
He says, "You are quite mad, Kewe"
And of course I am.
Why, I don't believe any of it — not the bloody body, not the bloody mind, not even the bloody Universe, or is it bloody multiverse.
"It's all illusion," I say.   "Don't you know, my lad, my lassie.   The game!   The game, me girl, me boy!   Takes on interest, don't you know.   T'is me sport, till doest find a better!"
Pssssst — but all this stuff is happening down here
Let's change it!
       UK War Crimes      
       UK Terror State — Downing Street Memo — How Bush and Blair took us all for a ride      
       War Criminals:  Blair, Brown, Campbell, Goldsmith, Hoon, Straw      
       Basra, Fallujah, Baghdad, Mosul...      
       US created Iraq — devastated cities       
       They are such liars     
       And during the past few years, more than a million martyrs fell by the bullets of the occupation and the country is now filled with more than 5 million orphans, a million widows and hundreds of thousands of maimed. Eli Cara and Uriel Zoshe Kelman in court today.    
       We used to be a nation in which the Arab would share with the Turkman and the Kurd and the Assyrian and the Sabean and the Yazid his daily bread.
    And the Shiite would pray with the Sunni in one line.  And the Muslim would celebrate with the Christian the birthday of Christ, may peace be upon him.     
  And despite the fact that we shared hunger under sanctions for more than 10 years, for more than a decade. The occupation turned our homes into never-ending funeral tents. Until we were invaded by the illusion of liberation that some had.  
       "A well-known former government minister told me that an American official had confirmed that the killings took place, saying to him, 'What a mess we're in — we got rid of one son of a bitch only to get another one'." Eli Cara and Uriel Zoshe Kelman in court today.    
       "The man ... described how Allawi had been taken to seven suspects, who were made to stand against a wall in a courtyard of the police station, their faces covered. After being told of their alleged crimes by a police official, Allawi had asked for a pistol, and then shot each prisoner in the head. [One of the men survived.]
    The explosive claims in tomorrow's 'Sydney Morning Herald' and 'Age' newspapers allege that the prisoners were handcuffed and blindfolded, lined up against a courtyard wall and shot by the Iraqi Prime Minister.     
  A few days before the New Year, on a crisp, sunny day in the Jordanian capital of Amman, I had tea with Iyad Allawi, the interim Prime Minister of Iraq, on the terrace of an unremarkable limestone villa that serves as the local headquarters for his political organization, the Iraqi National Accord, or the I.N.A.  
 
 
       Atrocities —        
       US and Israel atrocities        
       Israel using chemical weapons and phosphorous bombs.        
       Photos of Lebanon attacks on population by Israel        
       Injuries from White Phosphorus bombs        
       The role of the media in the second gulf war
Comprehensive study of how we were deceived by the media with links and photos
by New Zealand Editor Alastair Thompson         
Iraq — Death — Injury and Torture
— Military industrial complex
— Democracy in Thrall
       Guantanamo Hunger Strikers being tortured         
      US Federal Piechart Budget Anaylsis     
       Danes and Cartoons         
      U.S. War Crimes — Falluja photos — Graphic Images      
      US used chemical and thermobaric weapons in Fallujah     
      AK-47 assault rifle      
       — copper-plated, steel-jacketed, high velocity cartridge      
       — bullets      
    International Gun Trade     
      Palestine children in prison    
      I Refused    
      Kept in arm and leg restraints    
      Youth prisons     
      Humiliation     
      Despair     
       Thimerosal         
         Amish Children no autism       
         Mercury         
         how it relates to the         
         'Protecting America War on Terror Act'         
       Depleted Uranium — its use in Afghanistan, Iraq, Balkans      
       Photos of Iraq children being born deformed          
       Hunger, children dying         
          — locusts, drought — Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti         
      Cluster bombs killing injuring, Iraq, Lebanon       
      US new generation of landmines called Spider     
      Iraq death squads — Badr, White Toyota Land Cruisers      
      Glock pistols, Interior Ministry memo      
      Salvador Option      
      Basra, Fallujah, Baghdad, Mosul...   US created Iraq — devastated cities      
       Fake News          
      Torture, Death    
      Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala    
      Iraq, US         
       State of the Union — USA         
       US Congress — too stupid or gullible, and have killed many.       
       I would suggest that any member of the US Congress who had voted       
       for it, should be barred from ever running for       
       any public office in America ever again!       
       Iraq?     Vietnam?     Palestine?     Lebanon?   —   US War Crimes       
      Elegantly dressed statesmen constructing framework     
      that would allow them to kill quite a lot of people         
       Big melt warning for Arctic       
       Area covered by sea ice in Arctic shrunk for fourth consecutive year      
       Thermohaline shutdown inevitable       
      IRAN US Confrontation      
      American Democracy in Trouble — Al Gore     
      No longer possible to ignore the strangeness         
       al-Sadr City      
       More on al-Sadr — Aljazeera article      
      Global warming point of no return       
             Has the Age of Chaos Begun?       
      Pay me I am not a criminal      
      Young Afghan boy sent to Guantanamo      
      CO2 record high levels in the atmosphere          
          Increases in carbon dioxide never exceeding 30 ppm in 1,000 years           
      — Now 30 ppm in last 17 years.           
      Highest for 800,000 years — Climate fear as carbon levels soar          
        Afghanistan ready to flood Europe with first-grade heroin       
         — Afghan experts maintain that this year opium will be exceedingly rich in morphine.         
         — A mere seven kilograms of raw opium will produce one kilogram of heroin.         
      Why I would not kill in war
       — Stories of former Conscientious Objectors        
      Some U.S. soldiers speak — Iraq Invasion       
        Siberia, Alaska        
        Dramatic permafrost melt — click here       
     Iraqi rebels turning to defeat United States     
      I am ready to sacrifice the rest of my family to defeat America. 
  And God willing we will defeat her      
          Soot's effect on ice melt and glaciers          
          Melting glaciers Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Himalayas, Kilimanjaro...          
       US veteran Mothers against the war:       
       So anyway that filth-spewer and warmonger, George Bush       
       was speaking after the tragedy of the marines in Ohio...         
       Doris Colmes escaped Nazi Germany in 1938 — Patriot Act — Iraq photos      
       World Tribunal       
       War Crimes — Illegality of Preventive Attack       
       Unilateral Use of Force       
     "None of that spilling of secrets for crass political retribution       
       could have gone on without her knowledge and approval,       
       and thus complicity.      
     Little of it could have happened without her participation,       
      if not as a leaker herself,      
     at least with her direction and with her scripting."       
      Condoleezza Rice — Iraq — Rove       
       Simple Questions — Iraq June 2005 photos         
      Settlements — Trees — Jayyous — West Bank — Palestine        
      Flag draped U.S. coffins      
      Life expectancy drops from 60 years to 30 years      
      Zimbabwe crises    
      Children workers — Sweat shops — Unions           
       drinking the Kool-Aid — on the Death of Idealism       
      Loo!   Loo!   Lulu!   Loot! — New Orleans after Katrina        
      The real news is the shady April 2002 deal to go to war,      
      the cynical use of the U.N. to provide an excuse,      
      and the secret, illegal air war without the backing of Congress       
       Downing Street Memo — How Bush and Blair took us all for a ride         
       Blair Brown Campbell Goldsmith Hoon Straw       
       U.S. and British bombing raids illegal.         
      Coca-Cola and Plachimada, India        
      Deregulation, Accumulation of wealth       
      — India resistance and corporations       
      — India photos         
       Bolivia — Indigenous Revolt Evo Morales President         
      Venezuela       
       The elections of Hugo Chávez        
    Haiti     
    —   Aristide   Preval   Privatization   Poor   —     
    UN troops and Massacre          
      India — Class war         
       Globalization         
        Weather 2005        
       Mental Health disorders effecting returning US troops       
       US and  War — Interview with George Galloway       
       Most religious people are on the same side as most progressive people        
       Hiroshima, Nagasaki       
       — the bombs that incinerated and killed more than 200,000 people       
       — George Weller report         
      The Politics of Anti-Semitism      
      99 US Senators, 350 US House members attend AIPAC May, 2005 meeting     
      Life expectancy drops from 60 years to 30 years      
      Zimbabwe crises    

      Democracy in the United States and most of the rest of the industrial West
      is therefore a false front on a rich man’s mansion, a sham in which people are 
      given a political vote but then clock in each day to an economic system where
      their entire lives are regimented by a small group of executives busily downsizing
      whatever workplace rights people had gained in centuries of struggle.
      Agent Orange — Vietnam     
      Cleft palates      
      Mentally challenged      
      Extra fingers toes     
        Global weather, environment and climate change — includes photos      
       Why did you cut down the trees Grandma?       
       State of the World's Garden       
       Listing of Iraq War — includes photos       
       I beheld the wretch — the miserable monster whom I had created          
       World is actually running out of oil       
       Corporate toadies — John Kerry, John Edwards, Hillary Rodham Clinton       
       March 2005 Anti-war photos         
       False memories — George Orwell wisdom          
       The Negative Return Economy — a discourse on America’s black budget      
       Fascinating and lucrative    
       Black Budget?   What Black Budget?    
      With Bush's reinauguration, America now has the president it deserves      
       — Bush's reinauguration bash and the six children of Tal Afar      
      “When You Talk with God”      
        U.S. Debt        
      U.S. vote fraud continues 2005      
       Torture techniques no surprise       
       Israel: A Call for Divestment — Palestine photos          
      U.S. Soldiers against the war     
      Abu Ghraib soldier, Concientious Objector
Aidan Delgado      
      Dr. Martin Luther King      
       — War and Militarism —  Photos and images   Iraq   Vietnam 1967      
      Blair — WMD claims      
      The Empire      
       U.S. destructive, psychotic fantasy:    The War On Terror       
       — 500 'bunker buster' bombs         
        Atrocities in Palestine        
        Ahmed and Asma, story of two children dying        
        Sudan — Darfur
        Pictures and arial views of destruction
         — 2003 - 2005       
        Faith Fippinger        
        Book of Merlyn        
        2005 hottest year on record,         
        2004 4th hottest,        
        2003 3rd hottest,        
        2001-2002 tied for 2nd.        
       Bush, Blair and their minions have committed a monstrous crime       
       and they know it       
        Rumi        

 
 
 
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The purpose is to advance understandings of environmental, political,
human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues.
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                Abrupt climate event   
    World's Garden              War photos   
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