A family feels the cruelty of war

The hand of war grabs the young woman as she shops for twin-size sheets with pictures of Dalmatians.

"Come home!" her boyfriend's brother says on the other end.

"Why?"

"I can't tell you."

"No. You can. Tell me now!"
[more]

  thanks to daily KOS

Let Iraqis rebuild their own country
After the 1991 war, we had Iraq's oil industry back on its feet within weeks. Now, the Americans are having to import petrol

Remember Mahdi Obeidi?

He's the Iraqi nuclear scientist who made headlines back in June when he turned over parts of a gas centrifuge for uranium enrichment and blueprints related to Iraq's pre-1991 nuclear weapons program. The parts of course were buried under a rosebush in his backyard.

More recently, Obeidi made more embarrassing headlines when the Associated Press revealed that he
has consistently told CIA investigators that those much-discussed aluminum tubes had nothing to do with nuclear weapons development.

The AP reported that Obeidi was in Kuwait. But it turns out there's a bit more to the story. Given that Obeidi was so quick to come clean about the history of Iraq's nuclear weapons program and Saddam's plans to reconstitute the program once sanctions were lifted, you might think that we were helping him restart his life in the US, Iraq or perhaps some other Arab country.

Well, not exactly.
[more]

Voice of free Iraq walks out on US

A broadcaster who became known as "the voice of free Iraq" after the fall of Saddam Hussein has walked out of his job, saying the United States is losing the propaganda war.

Failure to invest in the new Iraqi broadcasting service means foreign channels are gaining popularity at the expense of the US, Ahmed al-Rikabi, the American-appointed director of TV and radio said yesterday.
[more]

The War On Truth
by John Pilger

In Baghdad, the rise and folly of rapacious imperial power is commemorated in a forgotten cemetery called the North Gate. Dogs are its visitors; the rusted gates are padlocked, and skeins of traffic fumes hang over its parade of crumbling headstones and unchanging historical truth.

Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude is buried here, in a mausoleum befitting his station, if not the cholera to which he succumbed. In 1917, he declared: "Our armies do not come...as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators." Within three years, 10,000 had died in an uprising against the British, who gassed and bombed those they called "miscreants". It was an adventure from which British imperialism in the Middle East never recovered.

Every day now, in the United States, the all-pervasive media tell Americans that their bloodletting in Iraq is well under way, although the true scale of the attacks is almost certainly concealed. Soon, more soldiers will have been killed since the "liberation" than during the invasion. Sustaining the myth of "mission" is becoming difficult, as in Vietnam. This is not to doubt the real achievement of the invaders' propaganda, which was the suppression of the truth that most Iraqis opposed both the regime of Saddam Hussein and the Anglo-American assault on their homeland. One reason the BBC's Andrew Gilligan angered Downing Street was that he reported that, for many Iraqis, the bloody invasion and occupation were at least as bad as the fallen dictatorship.

This is unmentionable here in America. The tens of thousands of Iraqi dead and maimed do not exist. When I interviewed Douglas Feith, number three to Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, he shook his head and lectured me on the "precision" of American weapons. His message was that war had become a bloodless science in the service of America's unique divinity. It was like interviewing a priest. Only American "boys" and "girls" suffer, and at the hands of "Ba'athist remnants", a self-deluding term in the spirit of General Maude's "miscreants". The media echo this, barely gesturing at the truth of a popular resistance and publishing galleries of GI amputees, who are described with a maudlin, down-home chauvinism which celebrates the victimhood of the invader while casting the vicious imperialism that they served as benign. At the State Department, the under-secretary for international security, John Bolton, suggested to me that, for questioning the fundamentalism of American policy, I was surely a heretic, "a Communist Party member", as he put it.
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Operation Oil Immunity

In other words, if ExxonMobil or ChevronTexaco touch Iraqi oil, it will be immune from legal proceedings in the United States. Anything that could go, and elsewhere has gone, awry with U.S. corporate oil operations will be immune to judgment: a massive tanker accident; an explosion at an oil refinery; the employment of slave labor to build a pipeline; murder of locals by corporate security; the release of billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The president, with a stroke of the pen, signed away the rights of Saddam's victims, creditors and of the next true Iraqi government to be compensated through legal action. Bush's order unilaterally declares Iraqi oil to be the unassailable province of U.S. corporations.

In the short term, through the Development Fund and the Export-Import Bank programs, the Iraqi people's oil will finance U.S. corporate entrees into Iraq. In the long term, Executive Order 13303 protects anything those corporations do to seize control of Iraq's oil, from the point of production to the gas pump -- and places oil companies above the rule of law.
[more]

  thanks to Yolanda Flanagan

The Pentagon has some explaining to do

  thanks to Whiskey Bar