Mr. Fish: Prewar Intelligence

From Iraq:

A Royal Visit...
by Riverbend

The one unforgivable sin back then was to have loyalties to the foreign occupier. “Today, the only ones who can guarantee their survival are the ones with the loyalties to an occupier- and even they aren’t safe.” She sighed heavily as she said this, her prayer beads clicking gently in her thin hands. “For the first time in many years, I fear death.” She said last night to no one in particular, as we sat around after dinner, sipping tea. We all objected, wishing her a longer life, telling her she had many years ahead of her, God willing. She shook her head at us like we didn’t understand- couldn’t possibly understand. “All people die eventually and I’ve had a longer life than most Iraqis- today children and young people are dying. I only fear death because I was born under a foreign occupation… I never dreamed I would die under one.”

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Turkey Masses Troops
on Iraqi Border

Life for Kurds in northern Iraq is about to get a lot more complicated. The Turkish army has begun massing troops on Iraq's northern border in an effort to combat the Kurdish armed group the PKK.

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War Crimes and Consequences

This weekend I received an e-mail from a friend in Iraq. It read, "Salam Dahr, I was in Ramadi today to ask about the situation. I was stunned for the news of a father and his three sons executed in cold blood by U.S. soldiers, then they blasted the house. The poor mother couldn't stand the shock, so she died of a heart attack." Sounds unbelievable, until you consider this short clip from CNN, which shows a war crime being committed by U.S. troops in Iraq. In this clip, shot on Oct. 26, 2003, Marines are seen killing a wounded Iraqi who was writhing on the ground, and cheering. One of the murderers then told CNN, "These guys are dead now you know, but it was a good feeling … and afterwards you're like, hell yeah, that was awesome, let's do it again."

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Commander: Contractors violating U.S. trafficking laws

The top U.S. commander in Iraq has ordered sweeping changes for privatized military support operations after confirming violations of human-trafficking laws and other abuses by contractors involving possibly thousands of foreign workers on American bases, according to records obtained by the Chicago Tribune.

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  thanks to Antiwar.com

Rebuilding of Iraqi Pipeline as Disaster Waiting to Happen

When Robert Sanders was sent by the Army to inspect the construction work an American company was doing on the banks of the Tigris River, 130 miles north of Baghdad, he expected to see workers drilling holes beneath the riverbed to restore a crucial set of large oil pipelines, which had been bombed during the invasion of Iraq.What he found instead that day in July 2004 looked like some gargantuan heart-bypass operation gone nightmarishly bad. A crew had bulldozed a 300-foot-long trench along a giant drill bit in their desperate attempt to yank it loose from the riverbed. A supervisor later told him that the project's crews knew that drilling the holes was not possible, but that they had been instructed by the company in charge of the project to continue anyway. A few weeks later, after the project had burned up all of the $75.7 million allocated to it, the work came to a halt. The project, called the Fatah pipeline crossing, had been a critical element of a $2.4 billion no-bid reconstruction contract that a Halliburton subsidiary had won from the Army in 2003. The spot where about 15 pipelines crossed the Tigris had been the main link between Iraq's rich northern oil fields and the export terminals and refineries that could generate much-needed gasoline, heating fuel and revenue for Iraqis.

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Projected Iraq War Costs Soar
Total Spending Is Likely to More Than Double, Analysis Finds

The cost of the war in Iraq will reach $320 billion after the expected passage next month of an emergency spending bill currently before the Senate, and that total is likely to more than double before the war ends, the Congressional Research Service estimated this week.

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