General Discussion

By Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian UK
Thursday 14 September 2006

Britain and US press allies for help to fight Taliban. 1,000-strong reserve battalion may be offered.

NATO was last night trying to head off a full-blown crisis of credibility as allied defence chiefs failed to offer any extra troops to help hard-pressed soldiers fighting Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.

By David Stout
The New York Times
Thursday 14 September 2006

Washington - President Bush went to Capitol Hill today to rally Republican support for his anti-terrorism policies, but a Senate committee dealt him a serious setback after a former member of his cabinet broke with him on a crucial issue.

Hours after Mr. Bush huddled with House Republicans, he suffered a defeat on the other side of the Capitol, as the Senate Armed Services Committee endorsed legislation that would give suspected terrorists more legal protections than the president desires.

By Lolita C. Baldor
The Associated Press
Tuesday 12 September 2006

Air Force official says nonlethal weapons should be used on people in crowd-control situations.

Washington - Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before they are used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.

By Dean Baker
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 13 September 2006

Most people didn't see this headline, because the deficit that just soared to a new record was the trade deficit, not the budget deficit. The newly released trade data for July showed the deficit running at annual rate of almost $820 billion, more than 6 percent of GDP. This is more than three times the size of the $260 billion dollar budget deficit now projected for 2006. Even adding in the money borrowed from Social Security, the budget deficit would only be $437 billion, just over half the size of the trade deficit.

By Robert Scheer
Truthdig
Tuesday 12 September 2006

Bush was correct in saying Monday night that "Our nation is being tested in a way that we have not been since the start of the Cold War." Unfortunately, it's Bush's administration that is testing us - with its relentless incompetence, attacks on our civil liberties and inability to acknowledge the bankruptcy of its policies.

By Kim Sengupta
The Independent UK
Wednesday 13 September 2006

Soldiers deployed in Helmand province five years on from the US-led invasion, and six months after the deployment of a large British force, have told The Independent that the sheer ferocity of the fighting in the Sangin valley, and privations faced by the troops, are far worse than generally known.

"We are flattening places we have already flattened, but the attacks have kept coming. We have killed them by the dozens, but more keep coming, either locally or from across the border," one said. "We have used B1 bombers, Harriers, F16s and Mirage 2000s. We have dropped 500lb, 1,000lb and even 2,000lb bombs. At one point our Apaches [helicopter gunships] ran out of missiles they have fired so many. Almost any movement on the ground gets ambushed. We need an entire battle group to move things. Yet they will not give us the helicopters we have been asking for.

United Press International
Friday 08 September 2006

Baghdad - Twenty-six men and one woman were hanged in Iraq's first mass execution since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

All the condemned had been convicted of terror and criminal charges, officials said. The executions were carried out at the Abu Ghraib prison where several gallows are erected, The Telegraph, a British newspaper, reported.

By Dahr Jamail
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday 12 September 2006

I've recently received several emails from Iraq. Some, like the first, have been sent to me from people I know. Others were passed on by my friend Gerri Haynes, who receives emails regularly from friends she made during her several trips to Iraq. I include them here, as the brunt of this piece, because they show the living hell that Iraq has become under US occupation.

Published on Monday, September 11, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

Lessons from the World Trade Center Ground Zero and the Aftermath of Katrina
by Robert Bullard

In Post-Katrina America, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) became a four-letter word for ineptness —fueling mistrust of government. Millions of Americans asked, “Can we trust the government to protect us?” This question is now directed at the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by thousands of first responders and volunteers who in September 2001 worked at “ground zero” at the World Trade Center in New York City. Cate Jenkins, a scientist for the EPA, says her agency lied about the WTC site when it claimed air at ground zero was safe to breathe in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks. EPA is accused of a cover-up.

On the Fifth Anniversary of 9/11, thousands of workers are sick and several have already died from what doctors believe are the effects of breathing the air at ground zero. Just this past week, Mount Sinai Medical Center released findings from the World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program, the largest multi-center clinical program providing medical screening examinations for the workers and volunteers who worked at Ground Zero and other sites following the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11. Specific findings included:

By Ira Chernus
TomDispatch.com
Sunday 10 September 2006

Yes, it changed everything - not September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers collapsed, but November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and left the U.S. at sea, drifting without an enemy in a strange new world.

Through four decades of the Cold War, Americans had been able to feel reasonably united in their determination to fight evil. And everyone, even children, knew the name of the evildoers: "the commies." Within two years after the Wall fell, the Soviet Union had simply disappeared. In the U.S., nobody really knew how to fight evil now, or even who the evildoers were. The world's sole remaining superpower was "running out of demons," as Colin Powell complained.

By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report
Monday 11 September 2006

Two weeks before 9/11, national security wasn't even a top priority for the Bush administration. Job security and health security were the top two major issues Bush planned to deal with in the fall of 2001, according to a transcript of a speech Bush gave on August 31, 2001, to celebrate the launch of the White House's new web site.

"He Would Fire the Next Person That Said That"
By Kevin Drum
The Washington Monthly
Friday 08 September 2006

Today, via Orin Kerr, comes a remarkable interview with Brigadier General Mark Scheid, chief of the Logistics War Plans Division after 9/11, and one of the people with primary responsibility for war planning. Shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan, he says, Donald Rumsfeld told his team to start planning for war in Iraq, but not to bother planning for a long stay:

By Dick Meyer
CBS News
Thursday 07 September 2006

"I've said to people we don't torture. And we don't."

That's what President Bush told Katie Couric yesterday.

That was a very odd thing to say on the very day his Pentagon repudiated interrogation "techniques" it had been using and embraced international standards for humane treatment of all detainees in military custody. These standards, by the way, will still not apply to detainees in CIA custody who can still be subjected to "techniques" - translation: torture.

Published on Friday, September 9, 2006 by the New York Daily News

Say Iraq Uranium Caused Ills
by Juan Gonzalez

Three years after returning from Iraq with persistent ailments they believe were caused by inhaling uranium dust from exploded U.S. shells, a group of former New York National Guardsmen finally got their first day in court this week against the federal government.

In a two-hour hearing late Wednesday before Manhattan Federal Judge John Koeltl, lawyers for the eight veterans argued that the Army caused the soldiers' illnesses when it violated its own safety protocols and exposed them to radioactive depleted-uranium dust.

Army doctors also covered up information about any exposures and failed to provide the soldiers proper medical treatment, the lawyers claimed.

Published on Friday, September 8, 2006
by the New York Times
by Mark Mazzetti

WASHINGTON - In defending the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret network of prisons on Wednesday, President Bush said the detention system had used lawful interrogation techniques, was fully described to select members of Congress and led directly to the capture of a string of terrorists over the past four years.

A review of public documents and interviews with American officials raises questions about Mr. Bush’s claims on all three fronts.

Mr. Bush described the interrogation techniques used on the C.I.A. prisoners as having been “safe, lawful and effective,” and he asserted that torture had not been used. But the Bush administration has yet to make public the legal papers prepared by government lawyers that served as the basis for its determination that those procedures did not violate American or international law.

The president said the Department of Justice approved a set of aggressive interrogation practices for C.I.A. detainees in 2002 after milder ones proved ineffective on Abu Zubaydah, the first of the Qaeda leaders taken into custody.

Current and former government officials said that specific interrogation methods were addressed in a series of documents, including an August 2002 memorandum by the Justice Department that authorized the C.I.A.’s use of 20 interrogation practices.

The August 2002 document, which was leaked to reporters in 2004, said interrogation methods just short of those that might cause pain comparable to “organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death” could be allowable without being considered torture.

By Nicholas Watt and Suzanne Goldenberg
The Guardian UK
Friday, 08 September 2006

UK is urged to take lead in monitoring agents. Scathing attack on Bush, "the King John of USA".

The head of Europe's human rights watchdog yesterday called for monitoring of CIA agents operating in Britain and other European countries, after President George Bush's admission that the US had detained terrorist suspects in secret prisons.

Published on Friday, September 8, 2006 by NY1 News
They fought for their country in Iraq, and now they are fighting their government over an illness that they say can be directly linked to their service.
by Dean Meminger

A group of New York Iraq war veterans are in a battle against their own military and government, and they are hoping the Federal courts will come to their rescue.

On Wednesday a judge held a hearing to determine if the nine veterans have the right to sue because they were exposed to depleted uranium from U.S. military weapons and equipment while in Iraq.

Le Monde | Editorial
Thursday, 07 September 2006

Defenders of human rights in the United States and elsewhere may rejoice over the speech George Bush pronounced Wednesday, September 6. The American president acknowledged the existence of "secret prisons," in which the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) locked up proven or presumed terrorists outside the United States, in order to be able to interrogate them as it liked. It is the first time since this "special program" was revealed by the Washington Post in November 2005 that the White House has confessed the truth. The governments suspected of having accepted these prisons - in Eastern Europe, the Near East, and Asia - had multiplied their denials.

Published on Thursday, September 7, 2006 by TomPaine.com
by Ray McGovern

Addressing the use of torture Wednesday, President George W. Bush played to the baser instincts of Americans as he strained to turn his violation of national and international law into Exhibit A on how “tough” he is on terrorists. His tour de force brought to mind the charge the Athenians leveled at Socrates—making the worse case appear the better. Bush’s remarks made it abundantly clear, though, that he is not about to take the hemlock.

As the fifth anniversary of 9/11 approaches and with the midterm elections just two months away, the president's speechwriters succeeded in making a silk purse out of the sow’s ear of torture. The artful offensive will succeed if—but only if—the mainstream media is as cowed, and the American people as dumb, as the president thinks they are.

By Joshua Holland
AlterNet
Thursday, 07 September 2006

Bush administration hawks are getting profit-hungry companies like CACI to do their dirty work in the war zones of the New American Empire. And we're footing the bill.

The thousands of mercenary security contractors employed in the Bush administration's "War on Terror" are billed to American taxpayers, but they've handed Osama Bin Laden his greatest victories - public relations coups that have transformed him from just another face in a crowd of radical clerics to a hero of millions in the global South (posters of Bin Laden have been spotted in largely Catholic Latin America during protests against George W. Bush).

The internet hums with viral videos of British contractors opening fire on civilian vehicles in Iraq as part of a bloody game, stories about CIA contractors killing prisoners in Afghanistan, veterans of Apartheid-era South African and Latin American death squads discovered among contractors' staffs and notoriously shady Russian arms dealers working for occupation authorities. One Special Forces operator told Amnesty International that some contractors are in it just because they "really want to kill somebody and they can do it easier there ... [not] everybody is like that, but a dangerously high element."

Published on Thursday, September 7, 2006 by the Inter Press Service
by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - In a major victory for the State Department and career military lawyers, the Pentagon Wednesday released a new Army field manual that requires all detainees held by the U.S. military, including suspected terrorists, to be treated according to the Geneva Conventions.

At the same time, President George W. Bush announced that 14 so-called "high-value detainees" -- those who have been held by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in secret locations around the world where they been subject to interrogation techniques that human rights groups have denounced as "torture" -- are being transferred to the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for eventual trial.

The New York Times | Editorial
Thursday, 07 September 2006

Two months before a Congressional election in which voters are expressing serious doubts about the Republicans' handling of national security, President Bush finally has some real terrorists in Guantánamo Bay.

Mr. Bush admitted yesterday that the Central Intelligence Agency has been secretly holding prisoners and said he was transferring 14 to Guantánamo Bay, including some believed to have been behind the 9/11 attacks. He said he was informing the Red Cross about the prisoners, placing them under the Geneva Conventions, and asking that Congress - right now - create military tribunals to try them.

Those are just the right steps. If Guantánamo Bay has any purpose, it is for men like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, considered key players in 9/11. They should go on trial. If convicted, they should be locked up for life.

But Mr. Bush's urgency was phony, driven by the Supreme Court's ruling, not principle.

The Associated Press
Thursday, 07 September 2006

London - President Bush's disclosure that terrorism suspects had been held in CIA-run prisons drew approval Wednesday from activists and defense attorneys, but some called for details on the secret lockups.

Bush said in a White House speech that a small number of high-value detainees - including the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed - had been kept in CIA custody, in order to be "held secretly, questioned by experts and, when appropriate, prosecuted for terrorist acts."

International lawmakers and civil rights campaigners have long called on Bush to acknowledge the United States used a network of secret prisons and have transferred prisoners between them on covert flights.

Wednesday, 06 September 2006

Washington - A new Army manual bans torture and degrading treatment of prisoners, for the first time specifically mentioning forced nakedness, hooding and other procedures that have become infamous during the five-year-old war on terror.

Read More: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/090606T.shtml

Wednesday, 06 September 2006

Tony Blair has faced a wave of resignations by junior members of his government over his refusal to name a date for resignation as Labour leader.
He branded ex-junior minister Tom Watson, the most senior person to quit, "disloyal, discourteous and wrong" for signing a letter urging him to go.
The resignations came as Mr Blair faces growing pressure to name a departure date or even quit now. Gordon Brown's backers say assurances he will resign in May are "not enough".

Read More: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/090606D.shtml

Wednesday, 06 September 2006

Washington - President Bush pushed Wednesday to resuscitate his plan to subject Guantanamo Bay detainees to special trials, a key policy in his anti-terror strategy that was struck down by the Supreme Court.

Read More: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/090606E.shtml

Tuesday, 05 September 2006

The history of American war profiteering is rife with egregious examples of incompetence, fraud, tax evasion, embezzlement, bribery and misconduct. As war historian Stuart Brandes has suggested, each new war is infected with new forms of war profiteering. Iraq is no exception. From criminal mismanagement of Iraq's oil revenues to armed private security contractors operating with virtual impunity, this war has created opportunities for an appalling amount of corruption. What follows is a list of some of the worst Iraq war profiteers who have bilked American taxpayers and undermined the military's mission.

Read More: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/090506I.shtml

U.S. response exasperating for some Americans
Anderson Cooper, (cnn) Blog
Tuesday, July 18, 2006

We spent the day in Cyprus tracking the latest efforts to get Americans out of Lebanon.

The U.S. government says it has evacuated more than 100 Americans, but their efforts are clearly lagging behind those of other countries. The French and Italians have gotten hundreds of their citizens out.

Six months ago I graphed Bush and Nixon's approval and disapproval ratings against each other. With a new Gallup poll showing Bush's approval rating at an all time low (for Gallup) of 34%, I thought now would be a good time to do an update.

Note that while Bush's approval rating is still a bit higher than Nixon's at a comparable point in his presidency, Bush's disapproval rating is almost exactly the same as Nixon's just before he resigned. In fact, at 63%, Bush's current disapproval rating was only exceeded by Nixon's in two Gallup polls—March, 1974 (65%) and the final poll in July, 1974 just before Nixon left office (66%). For instance, in June, 1974 Nixon's disapproval rating was only 58%, noticeably lower than Bush's is today.

US forces planning for the long haul in Iraq

The US armed forces are planning to stay in Iraq for at least a decade, a media report claimed on Monday, quoting military strategists.

A report in Newsweek said that the 38 square kilometres mini-city and airport Balad was the evidence that American forces were preparing for the long haul.