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January 2, 2010
al-Baiyaa, Iraq
 America's Oldest Journal Covering the Newspaper IndustryThursday, February 14, 2008    
Counting Iraqi Casualties — and a Media Controversy
The author commissioned the "Lancet" study recently attacked in a National Journal report and by the Wall Street Journal.   He calls the criticism a "hatchet job," fraudulent or based on innuendo.
By John Tirman
(February 14, 2008   Commentary)    One puzzling aspect of the news media’s coverage of the Iraq war is their squeamish treatment of Iraqi casualties.   The scale of fatalities and wounded is a difficult number to calculate, but its importance should be obvious.   Yet, apart from some rare and sporadic attention to mortality figures, the topic is virtually absent from the airwaves and news pages of America.   This absence leaves the field to gross misunderstandings, ideological agendas, and political vendettas.
The upshot is that the American public — and U.S. policy makers, for that matter — are badly informed on a vital dimension of the war effort.
As an academic interested in the war’s violence, I commissioned a household survey in October 2005 to gauge mortality, and I naturally turned to the best professionals available — the Johns Hopkins University epidemiologists who had conducted such surveys before in Iraq, Congo, and elsewhere.   Their survey of 1,850 households resulted in a shocking number: 600,000 dead by violence in the first 40 months of the war.   The survey was extensively peer reviewed and published in the British medical journal, the Lancet, in October 2006.
The findings caused a ripple of interest (in part because President Bush, during a press conference, called the results “not credible”) and stirred a very lively debate among the few people interested in the methods.   By and large, however, the survey passed from public view fairly quickly, and the news media continued to cite the very low numbers produced by the Iraq Body Count, a U.K.-based NGO that counts civilian deaths through English-language newspaper reports.
Another survey, this one undertaken by a private U.K. firm, Opinion Business Research (ORB), found more than one million dead through August 2007.   Yet another, a much larger house-to-house survey was conducted by the Iraq Ministry of Health (MoH).   This also found a sizable mortality figure — 400,000 “excess deaths” (the number above the pre-war death rate), but estimated 151,000 killed by violence.   The period covered was the same as the survey published in The Lancet, but was not released until January 2008.
The ORB results were almost totally ignored in the American press, and the MoH numbers, which did get one-day play, were covered incompletely.   Virtually no newspaper report dug into the data tables of the Iraqi MoH report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, for that total excess mortality figure, or to ask why the MoH report showed a flat rate for killing throughout the war when every other account shows sharp increases through 2005 and 2006.   The logical explanation for this discrepancy is that people responding to interviewers from the government, and a ministry controlled by Moktada al Sadr, would not want to admit that their loved one died by violence.   There were, instead, very large numbers of dead by road accidents and “unintentional injuries.”   The American press completely missed this.
What some in the news media did not miss, however, was a full-scale assault on the legitimacy of the Lancet article by the National Journal, the “insider” Capitol Hill weekly.
The attack, by reporters Carl Cannon and Neil Munro, which was largely built on persistent complaints of two critics and heaps of innuendo, was largely ignored—its circulation is only about 10,000 — until the Wall Street Journal picked up on one bit of their litany: that “George Soros” funded the survey.   “The Lancet study was funded by anti-Bush partisans and conducted by antiwar activists posing as objective researchers,” said the January 9, 2008, editorial (titled “The Lancet’s Political Hit”) and concluded: “the Lancet study could hardly be more unreliable.”   The editorial created sensation in the right-wing blogosphere and in several allied news outlets.
Let me convey what I thought was a simple and unremarkable fact I told Munro in an interview in November and one of the Lancet authors emailed Cannon the details of how the survey was funded.   My center at MIT used internal funds to underwrite the survey.   More than six months after the survey was commissioned, the Open Society Institute, the charitable foundation begun by Soros, provided a grant to support public education efforts of the issue.   We used that to pay for some travel for lectures, a web site, and so on.
OSI, much less Soros himself (who likely was not even aware of this small grant), had nothing to do with the origination, conduct, or results of the survey.   The researchers and authors did not know OSI, among other donors, had contributed.   And we had hoped the survey’s findings would appear earlier in the year but were impeded by the violence in Iraq.   All of this was told repeatedly to Munro and Cannon, but they choose to falsify the story.   Charges of political timing were especially ludicrous, because we started more than a year before the 2006 election and tried to do the survey as quickly as possible.   It was published when the data were ready.
The New York Post and the Sunday Times of London, both owned by Rupert Murdoch, followed the WSJ editorial and trumpeted the Soros connection and the supposed “fraud” which Munro and Cannon hinted.   “SOROS IRAQ DEATH STORY WAS A SHAM” was a headline in the Post, which was followed by a story in which scarcely anything stated was true.
The charges of “fraud” that were also central to the National Journal piece were based on distortions or ignorance of statistical method, such as random sampling and sample size, or speculations about Iraqi field researchers fabricating data.   Nothing close to proof of misdeeds was ever offered.
The two principal authors, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts, parried the fraud charges effectively on their web site and in letters to the editors, but of course these are rarely noticed as much as the original charges.   Those charges were wholly speculative and at times based on small irregularities in the collection of data, hardly a crime in the midst of the bloodiest period of the war.   For example, some death certificates were not collected from respondents; about 80 percent of the time they were.   (In the Iraqi MoH survey, death certificates were never collected, making their claims about violence v. nonviolent causes unconfirmable.)
In any case, the many peer reviews of The Lancet article, including one by a special committee of the World Health Organization, gave the survey methods and operations passing grades.
Munro then went on the Glenn Beck program and suggested the Iraqi researchers were unreliable (“without U.S. supervision”) and that the Lancet authors “made it clear they wanted this study published before the election.”   Both of those assertions are untrue.   Beck then repeated these allegations on his radio program, and added that there was no peer review of the fatality figures, another falsehood, and “we’re getting it jammed down our throat by people who are undercover who are pulling purse strings, who are manipulating the news.”
The charge, repeated in all these media, that the Iraqi research leader, Riyadh Lafta, M.D., operated “without U.S. supervision” and was therefore suspect is particularly interesting.   Munro, in a note to National Review Online, asserted that Lafta “said Allah guided the prior 2004 Lancet/Johns Hopkins death-survey,” which he also had noted in the National Journal piece.   When he interviewed me he pestered me about two anonymous donors, demanding to know if either were Arab or Muslim.   A pattern here is visible, one which reeks of religious prejudice.
Munro had also ignored the corroborating evidence I sent him, the 4.5 million displaced (suggesting hundreds of thousands of fatalities, drawing on the ratio of all other wars); estimates of new widows (500,000 from the war); and the other surveys done in Iraq suggesting enormous numbers of casualties (ABC/USA Today poll of March 2007, showing roughly 53% physically harmed by war).   When I mentioned these things to him on the telephone, he literally screamed that such data didn’t matter, that the Lancet probe was “a hoax.”   Lancet article authors also cite several cases where they were misquoted.   The National Journal’s editors have been informed of their reporters’ misconduct and errors, and have not responded.
So the smear is complete — a “political hit” by the “anti-Bush billionaire,” complicity by anti-war academics, fraud by Muslims devoted to Allah — and repeated over and over in the right-wing media.   Little has of this has appeared in the legitimate news media, apart from right-wing columnists like Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe.
One might expect that such nonsense is obvious to neutral observers, but it constitutes a kind of harassment that scholars must fend off, diverting from more important work.   Gilbert Burnham, the lead author on the Lancet article, runs health clinics in Afghanistan and East Africa, and is spending inordinate amounts of time responding to the attacks.   Les Roberts, a coauthor, and I have both had colleagues at our universities called by Munro to ask if they would punish us for fraud.   The OSI people have also been writing letters to set the record straight.   Most important, Riyadh Lafta, who has been threatened before, may be in more danger due to these attacks.
As to the issue of the human cost of the war, even the legitimate press that has avoided this kerfuffle might be intimidated from taking on the issue in depth.   The fact that the National Journal hatchet job and the MoH survey appeared within days of each other sent a message to editors around the United States — one survey is “discredited” and one is legitimate.   The treatment of the MoH survey that week often noted its death-by-violence number was one-fourth of the Lancet figure — forgetting, again, that total war-related mortality were much closer in both, and congruent with other surveys.   The New York Times did run an editorial in early February about the dead in Iraq — the 124 journalists killed in the war.
The topic of the war’s exceptional human costs, now inflamed by these calumnies, appears to be too hot to handle.   Even with all this fuss in January, no explorations of the Iraqi mortality from the war have appeared in the major dailies.   No editorials, no examination of the methods (or the danger and difficulty of collecting data), no sense that the scale of killing might affect the American position, or might shed some light on U.S. war strategy, or might point to honorable exits and reconstruction obligations.   Remarkably, no curiosity at all about the dead of Iraq, and what they can tell us.
That, in the end, may be the biggest injustice of all.
***
All the surveys can be found here. here.
The National Journal article, “Data Bomb,” is here.
My annotated copy of "Data Bomb" and much more is here.
John Tirman is Executive Director and Principal Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology's Center for International Studies.
© 2008 Nielsen Business Media, Inc.   All rights reserved.
January 5, 2010
 
Published on Friday, September 14, 2007 by the Los Angeles Times
Poll: Civilian Death Toll in Iraq May Top 1 Million
A British survey offers the highest estimate to date.
by Tina Susman
Angelina Jolie speaking with an elderly refugee woman
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.
The [US occupation] military has said civilian deaths from sectarian violence have fallen more than 55% since [US] President Bush sent an additional 28,500 troops to Iraq this year, but it does not provide specific numbers.
According to the ORB poll, a survey of 1,461 adults suggested that the total number slain during more than four years of war was more than 1.2 million.
ORB said it drew its conclusion from responses to the question about those living under one roof: “How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003?”
Based on Iraq’s estimated number of households — 4,050,597 — it said the 1.2 million figure was reasonable.
There was no way to verify the number, because the [US installed] government does not provide a full count of civilian deaths.
Neither does the U.S. military.
Iraq refugee children created by US terror state
Continued violence driven by US government money
All funded by U.S. taxpayer
More than 4 million Iraq people displaced
Both, however, say that independent organizations greatly exaggerate estimates of civilian casualties.
ORB said its poll had a margin of error of 2.4%.
According to its findings, nearly one in two households in Baghdad had lost at least one member to war-related violence, and 22% of households nationwide had suffered at least one death.
It said 48% of the victims were shot to death and 20% died as a result of car bombs, with other explosions and military bombardments blamed for most of the other fatalities.
The survey was conducted last month.
It was the highest estimate given so far of civilian deaths in Iraq. Last year, a study in the medical journal Lancet put the number at 654,965, which Iraq’s government has dismissed as “ridiculous.”
In its latest salvo at Iran, the U.S. military accused the Islamic Republic of providing the 240-millimeter rocket that earlier this week slammed into Camp Victory, the sprawling base that houses the U.S. Army headquarters.
The attack on the base near Baghdad’s airport injured 11 soldiers and killed one “third-country national.”
At a news conference, a military spokesman, Army Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, displayed a chunk of metal that he said had come from the rocket.
Asked how he could be sure it was of Iranian origin, Bergner said its color and markings were unique to rockets from Iran.
The United States accuses Iran’s Shiite leaders of providing weapons, training and other assistance to Shiite militias fighting U.S. forces in Iraq. Iran denies the accusation.
Deletions from article by TheWE.biz regarding four Sadr City deaths, due to causation of deaths not known but assumed by L.A. Times, therefore regarded as furthering US military propaganda.
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uruknet.info
اوروكنت.إنفو
informazione dall'iraq occupato
information from occupied iraq
أخبار منالعراق المحتلة
Lancet report Iraq doctor denied visit to U.S. conference
The magnitude of that has been lost on the American people.   Both the British and U.S. governments have discounted these figures
Apr 20, 2007
SEATTLE — An Iraqi doctor who concluded that more Iraqi civilians have died in the war than has been reported has been prevented from attending a medical conference at the University of Washington.
Riyadh Lafta had been scheduled to give a lecture this evening at the Seattle campus but his visa to the United States has not been approved.
The State Department cited miscommunication as the reason for the delay.
Lafta is an epidemiologist who teaches at Al-Mustansiriya University College of Medicine in Baghdad.
He co-wrote an October 2006 article that concluded nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died since the war began in March 2003.
The article appeared in the British medical journal, The Lancet.
The findings were 10 times greater than other studies, said Tim Takaro, an associate professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
"The magnitude of that has been lost on the American people. Both the British and U.S. governments have discounted these figures," said Takaro, who conducts research with Lafta.
The School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the UW asked Lafta to discuss the study, as well as elevated cancer levels in southern Iraq.
Last July, Lafta applied for a visa with the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan.
Officials there tried contacting the doctor twice by e-mail, but never received a response, State Department spokesman Steve Royster said. Incomplete visa applications can be held.
They were stonewalling us
"This is a matter of a simple but unfortunate miscommunication," Royster said.
Amy Hagopian, a UW acting assistant professor who is conducting research with Lafta, believes the reason is more political.
"My hypothesis is the Bush administration was extremely threatened by The Lancet study," Hagopian said.
Hagopian said both Lafta and UW officials tried contacting federal officials when they hadn't heard anything about his visa.
The university was assisted by staff from the offices of both U.S. Representative Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), who visited Iraq in 2002, and Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.)
"They were stonewalling us," she said. "Any comments to the contrary are obfuscation."
British government denied a four-hour stopover transit visa
Lafta was invited to deliver his lecture today at Simon Fraser University so it could be broadcast by video to the UW. However, the British government this week denied him a four-hour transit visa for a stopover between the Middle East and Canada.
Les Roberts of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, who worked with Lafta on the Iraqi death estimates, was scheduled to speak in his place at the UW.
 US military attack, July 2007
Al-Maamel, Iraq
Weeps for loved one killed in US military raid, July 2007
Al-Maamel, Iraq
“Generally in wars, total casualties, which include wounded, crippled, and lost, are many times the number killed, often as high as ten times.
So while Americans, thirty years later, still weep at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington — a monument representing about sixty thousand deaths over ten years of war — they have inflicted on Iraq, in just three weeks, that same proportionate loss — all of them civilians.
With Iraq‘s population being less than ten percent that of the United States, such losses must be multiplied by ten to get some feel for their impact on the society.
Is this how a great power behaves in the early part of the 21st century?
Especially a power that enjoys reminding us at every opportunity — I suppose because it is so easy for the rest of the world, just watching its actions, to forget — that America stands for human rights and democratic principles?”
John Chuckman
 US military attack, July 2007
Al-Maamel, Iraq
Weep for loved one killed in US military raid, July 2007
Al-Maamel, Iraq
Middle East
Iraqi Dead May Total 600,000, Study Says
A boy at his father’s coffin in Baghdad yesterday. 600000 Iraq Deaths. Body count of people dying in Iraq is 600,000. Study in 2004 indicated coalition air strikes have led to more than 100,000 deaths in Iraq, scientists find. 15,000 violent deaths a month, Iraqi government hospitals and morgue in Baghdad published United Nations report in Iraq. Highest month for Iraqi civilian deaths since the American invasion. Estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths. Death rates were higher outside the capital, the study said. Photo: Khalid Mohammed/Associated Press
Khalid Mohammed/Associated Press
A boy at his father’s coffin in Baghdad yesterday.
Death rates were higher outside the capital, the study said.
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: October 11, 2006
BAGHDAD, Oct. 10 — A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here.
A study by John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health determined the rate of violent deaths in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. Extrapolating from a survey of 1,849 Iraq households, the report estimates that 601, 027 Iraqi civilians dies in violence between March 2003 and July, a figure far higher than previous estimates.
The figure breaks down to about 15,000 violent deaths a month, a number that is quadruple the one for July given by Iraqi government hospitals and the morgue in Baghdad and published last month in a United Nations report in Iraq.   That month was the highest for Iraqi civilian deaths since the American invasion.
But it is an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.
It is the second study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
It uses samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.
The findings of the previous study, published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, in 2004, had been criticized as high, in part because of its relatively narrow sampling of about 1,000 families, and because it carried a large margin of error.
The new study is more representative, its researchers said, and the sampling is broader: it surveyed 1,849 Iraqi families in 47 different neighborhoods across Iraq.   The selection of geographical areas in 18 regions across Iraq was based on population size, not on the level of violence, they said.
The study comes at a sensitive time for the Iraqi government, which is under pressure from American officials to take action against militias driving the sectarian killings.
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.   Now, only the government is allowed to release figures.   It has not provided statistics for September, though a spokesman said Tuesday that it would.
The American military has disputed the Iraqi figures, saying that they are far higher than the actual number of deaths from the insurgency and sectarian violence, in part because they include natural deaths and deaths from ordinary crime, like domestic violence.
But the military has not released figures of its own, giving only percentage comparisons.   For example, it cited a 46 percent drop in the murder rate in Baghdad in August from July as evidence of the success of its recent sweeps.   At a briefing on Monday, the military’s spokesman declined to characterize the change for September.
The military has released rough counts of average numbers of Iraqis killed and wounded in a quarterly accounting report mandated by Congress.   In the report, “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq,” daily averages of dead and wounded Iraqi civilians, soldiers and police officers rose from 26 a day in 2004 to almost 120 a day in August 2006.
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.
It argues that absolute numbers of dead, like morgue figures, could not give a full picture of the “burden of conflict on an entire population,” because they were often incomplete.
The mortality rate before the American invasion was about 5.5 people per 1,000 per year, the study found.   That rate rose to 19.8 deaths per 1,000 people in the year ending in June.
Gunshots were the largest cause of death, the study said, at 56 percent of all violent deaths, while car bombs accounted for about 13 percent.   Deaths caused by the American military declined as an overall percentage from March 2003 to June 2006.
Violent deaths have soared since the American invasion, but the rise is in part a matter of spotty statistical history.   Under Saddam Hussein, the state had a monopoly on killing, and the deaths of thousands of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds that it caused were never counted.
While the near collapse of the Iraqi state makes precise record-keeping difficult, authorities have made considerable progress toward tracking death figures.   In 2004, when the Johns Hopkins study was first released, authorities were still compiling deaths on an ad hoc basis.   But by this year, they were being provided regularly.
Iraqi authorities say morgue counts are more accurate than is generally thought.   Iraqis prefer to bury their dead immediately, and hurry bodies of loved ones to plots near mosques or, in the case of Shiites, in sacred burial sites.   Even so, they have strong incentives to register the death with a central morgue or hospital in order to obtain a death certificate, required at highway checkpoints, by cemetery workers, and for government pensions.   Death certificates are counted in the statistics kept by morgues around the country.
The most recent United Nations figure, 3,009 Iraqis killed in violence across the country in August, was compiled by statistics from Baghdad’s central morgue, and from hospitals and morgues countrywide.   It assumes a daily rate of about 97.
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.
Gilbert Burnham, the principle author of the study, said the figures showed an increase of deaths over time that was similar to that of another civilian casualty project, Iraq Body Count, which collates deaths reported in the news media, and even to that of the military.   But even Iraq Body Count puts the maximum number of deaths at just short of 49,000.
As far as skepticism about the death count, he said that counts made by journalists and others focused disproportionately on Baghdad, and that death rates were higher elsewhere.
“We found deaths all over the country,” he 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.
Statistics experts in the United States who were able to review the study said the methods used by the interviewers looked legitimate.
Robert Blendon, director of the Harvard Program on Public Opinion and Health and Social Policy, said interviewing urban dwellers chosen at random was “the best of what you can expect in a war zone.”
But he said the number of deaths in the families interviewed — 547 in the post-invasion period versus 82 in a similar period before the invasion — was too few to extrapolate up to more than 600,000 deaths across the country.
Donald Berry, chairman of biostatistics at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, was even more troubled by the study, which he said had “a tone of accuracy that’s just inappropriate.”
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Injured Iraq people
January 5, 2010

It boggles my mind how the U.S. share of this slaughter could have been kept out of the report offered in the New York Times or USA Today.
The Times did run some pie charts that showed in a dark shade the share of deaths caused by U.S. forces, but because no numbers or percentages were provided, and because no such figures appeared in the accompanying story, the impact was greatly diminished.
What made the Times article, which ran on an inside page, particularly offensive, was a page-one story that ran on the same day, headlined "3rd Iraq Death Has One town Shaken to Core."
This piece looked in detail about how the deaths in Iraq of three servicemen from the New York hamlet of Highland, had caused such widespread grief and anguish in a small American town.
How on earth could editors give that story — excellent and poignant as it was in its own right — such prominence while burying a report about the wholesale slaughter of a people by U.S. forces?
Don't the editors realize that every one of those Iraqi deaths was producing the same kind of grief and anger in towns and villages across Iraq?
      Dave Lindorff      http://www.uruknet.info     October 11, 2006      
 Kewe note:  All is the fruit of the US invasion.   Nothing can be excused.
All are war crimes directly the responsiblity of the US people.
        Les Roberts joins us now from Syracuse, New York        
        — He is one of the main researchers of the 650,000 Iraq deaths study.         

        He was with Johns Hopkins when he co-authored the study        
        Video click here to watch at www.DemocracyNow.org       
Kirkuk, Iraq
January 4, 2010
uruknet.info
اوروكنت.إنفو
informazione dal medio oriente
information from middle east
المعلومات من الشرق الأوسط
War Crimes Committed by the United States in Iraq and Mechanisms for Accountability
Consumers for Peace.org
October 10, 2006
War Crimes Report Shows US Violations of International Law and Demands Prosecution of US Military and Civilian Leaders
The violence of the Iraq War, the chaos that has come to Iraq, can be traced directly to the illegality of the invasion and occupation of that country and the illegality of the tactics and weapons being used to maintain the occupation.   U.S. War Crimes in Iraq and Mechanisms for Accountability documents these violations and calls on us all to demand investigation and prosecution of violations of international law by military and civilian leaders.
The report was prepared by Consumers for Peace.org with the advice of Karen Parker, noted lawyer in human rights and humanitarian law.   Ms. Parker is President of the San-Francisco-based Association of Humanitarian Lawyers ( www.humanlaw.org ) and Chief Delegate to the United Nations for the Los Angeles-based International Educational Development/Humanitarian Law Project (IED/AHL), an accredited non-governmental organization on the U.N. Secretary-General's list.
Dahr Jamail, noted independent journalist who spent more than eight months reporting from occupied Iraq, writes the following about the report:
I cannot endorse strongly enough this report prepared by Karen Parker regarding U.S. war crimes in Iraq.
Having witnessed much of what is so well documented in this report, it is a clear and encompassing indictment of the Bush Administration for the war crimes they are directly responsible for in Iraq.
Until evidence such as this begins to see the light of day in a court of law and the perpetrators brought to justice, the world remains unsafe and unstable from an administration determined to rule the world.   After witnessing what they are capable of in Iraq, I have no doubt these people will not stop in their quest for world domination.?
Instead, they must be stopped.
And the only way to do that is bring the guilty to justice.   This document will help achieve that goal.
Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Non-Violence, three-time nominee for the Noble Peace Prize, who has visited Iraq 28 times in the last 15 years, writes of the report:
After spending four days in the fortified and secure Green Zone, in Iraq, during September 06, former Secretary of State James Baker III assured that the investigative panel he led had not spent any time wringing our hands over what mistakes might or might not have been created in the past.
(NYT, September 20, 2006).
The Consumers for Peace report on war crimes committed in Iraq helps us understand our responsibility not to wring our hands but rather to demand accountability from elected representatives by delivering this report to them and to local media.   How many people killed?
How many families torn apart?   How many homes destroyed?
How many livelihoods gone?
How many lives ruined?
How many cities sacrificed?
We bear responsibility to end the war in Iraq, insist on just reparations for suffering caused, and promote careful, legal scrutiny of the crimes committed.
This report beckons all who read it to stop collaborating with illegal, immoral warmongers who recklessly afflict Iraq.
Neil MacKay, multi-award winning Home Affairs and Investigations Editor of the Sunday Herald (Scotland), writes:
"What has happened in Iraq is a great sin and a great crime.
The invasion and occupation have stained the concepts of democracy, freedom and liberty; and disgraced the good name of the people of both the United States of America and Great Britain.
As a journalist who has investigated the roots of this war, and the on-going horror of what is happening in Iraq, I fully commend this report to readers.
It is an important reminder of the blood which is on the hands of our leaders, and the shame that the governments of the UK and the USA have brought to the British and American people by perpetrating a criminal war in our name."
Document written as legal brief:
War Crimes Committed by the United States in Iraq and Mechanisms for Accountability
128,000 Iraqis Killed By US Occupation
Jul 12, 2005
By Muhammad Abu Nasr, Free Arab Voice; Edited For Publication By JUS
An Iraqi humanitarian organization that follows the human rights situation in the country announced on Monday morning that the number of Iraqis killed since the US occupation of Iraq has now topped 128,000.
Dr. Hatim al-‘Alwani, Chairman of the ‘Iraqiyun humanitarian organization in Baghdad told the correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam that everyone who has been killed since the US invasion must be seen as victims of that invasion.
Al-‘Alawani said that 55 percent of those killed have been women and children aged 12 and under.
Asked how these data were obtained, Dr al-‘Alwani said that relatives and families of victims supplied information, as did Iraqi hospitals in all the country’s provinces.
Not included in count
It should be noted that the figure of 128,000 quoted by “al-‘Iraqiyun” only includes those whose relatives have been informed of their deaths.  Those who were abducted or assassinated and not heard from — and there are many such cases — were not included in the count.
The correspondent noted that the figure of 128,000 agrees with what Mafkarat al-Islam’s correspondents have been witnessing and reporting from the various cities in which they work, in particular as a result of the very bloody US assaults on al-Fallujah and al-Qa’im.
        Les Roberts joins us now from Syracuse, New York        
        — He is one of the main researchers of the 650,000 Iraq deaths study.         

        He was with Johns Hopkins when he co-authored the study        
        Video click here to watch at www.DemocracyNow.org       
Thursday, 28 October, 2004
Falluja residents inspect the rubble left by a US air strike
Iraqi people are now 58 times more likely to die a violent death
Iraq death toll 'soared post-war'
Poor planning, air strikes by coalition forces and a "climate of violence" have led to more than 100,000 extra deaths in Iraq, scientists say.
A study published by the Lancet claims the risk of death by violence for civilians in Iraq is now 58 times higher than before the US-led invasion.
It condemns the coalition's planning on public health as "grievously in error".
The Lancet admits the research is based on a small sample - under 1,000 homes - but says the findings are "convincing".
Scientists from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the US city of Baltimore gathered data on births and deaths since January 2002 from 33 clusters of 30 households each across Iraq.
Air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most of the violent deaths
Dr Les Roberts
They found the relative risk of death was one-and-a-half times higher for Iraqi civilians after the 2003 invasion than in the preceding 15 months.
That figure jumps to two-and-a-half times higher if data from Falluja - the scene of repeated heavy fighting - is included.
Before the invasion, most people died as a result of heart attack, stroke and chronic illness, the report says, whereas after the invasion, "violence was the primary cause of death."

Bloodied hospital floor in Falluja
Women and children are reportedly the biggest casualties of air strikes


Violent deaths were mainly attributed to coalition forces - and most individuals reportedly killed were women and children.
Dr Les Roberts, who led the study, said: "Making conservative assumptions we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more, have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
"Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most of the violent deaths."
He said his team's work proved it was possible to compile data on public health "even during periods of extreme violence".
The sample included randomly selected households in Baghdad, Basra, Arbil, Najaf and Karbala, as well as Falluja.
"With the admitted benefit of hindsight and from a purely public health perspective, it is clear that whatever planning did take place was grievously in error."
He went on: "Democratic imperialism has led to more deaths not fewer. This political and military failure continues to cause scores of casualties among non-combatants."
Democratic imperialism has led to more deaths not fewer
Lancet editor Richard Horton
Lancet editor Richard Horton said: He urges the coalition forces to rethink their strategy to "prevent further unnecessary human casualties".
"For the sake of a country in crisis and for a people under daily threat of violence, the evidence we publish today must change heads as well as pierce hearts," he said.
Lancet report interview
Les Roberts, lead researcher Johns Hopkins
Washington Post     October 29  2004
By EMMA ROSS — The Associated Press
LONDON — Researchers have estimated that as many as 100,000 more Iraqis — many of them women and children — died since the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq than would have been expected otherwise, based on the death rate before the war. 
Writing in the British-based medical journal The Lancet, the American and Iraqi researchers concluded that violence accounted for most of the extra deaths and that airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition were a major factor.
There is no official figure for the number of Iraqis killed since the conflict began, but some non-governmental estimates range from 10,000 to 30,000.  As of Thursday, 1,106 U.S. servicemen had been killed, according to the U.S. Defense Department.
The scientists who wrote the report concede that the data they based their projections on were of "limited precision," because the quality of the information depends on the accuracy of the household interviews used for the study.  The interviewers were Iraqi, most of them doctors.
Designed and conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, the study was published Thursday on The Lancet's Web site.
The survey attributed most of the extra deaths to violence and said airstrikes by coalition forces caused most of the violent deaths.
"Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children," the researchers wrote.
The report was released just days before the U.S. presidential election, and the lead researcher said he wanted it that way.  The Lancet routinely publishes papers on the Web before they appear in print, particularly if it considers the findings of urgent public health interest.
Those reports then appear later in the print issue of the journal.
The journal's spokesmen said they were uncertain which print issue the Iraqi report would appear in and said it was too late to make Friday's issue, and possibly too late for the Nov. 5 edition.
Les Roberts, the lead researcher from Johns Hopkins, said the article's timing was up to him.
"I emailed it in on Sept. 30 under the condition that it came out before the election," Roberts told The Associated Press.
"My motive in doing that was not to skew the election.  My motive was that if this came out during the campaign, both candidates would be forced to pledge to protect civilian lives in Iraq.
"I was opposed to the war and I still think that the war was a bad idea, but I think that our science has transcended our perspectives," Roberts said.  "As an American, I am really, really sorry to be reporting this."
Richard Peto, an expert on study methods who was not involved with the research, said the approach the scientists took is a reasonable one to investigate the Iraq death toll.
However, it's possible that they may have zoned in on hotspots that might not be representative of the death toll across Iraq, said Peto, a professor of medical statistics at Oxford University in England.
Lancet editor Richard Horton wrote in an editorial accompanying the survey that more household clusters would have improved the precision of the report, "but at an enormous and unacceptable risk to the team of interviewers."
"This remarkable piece of work represents the efforts of a courageous team of scientists," he wrote.
To conduct the survey, investigators visited 33 neighborhoods spread evenly across the country in September, randomly selecting clusters of 30 households to sample.  Of the 988 households visited, 808, consisting of 7,868 people, agreed to participate.  Each household was asked how many people lived in the home and how many births and deaths there had been since January 2002.
The scientists then compared death rates in the 15 months before the invasion with those that occurred during the 18 months after the attack and adjusted those numbers to account for the different time periods.
Even though the sample size appears small, this type of survey is considered accurate and acceptable by scientists and was used to calculate war deaths in Kosovo in the late 1990s.
The investigators worked in teams of three.  Five of the six Iraqi interviewers were doctors and all six were fluent in English and Arabic.
In the households reporting deaths, the person who died had to be living there at the time of the death and for more than two months before to be counted.  In an attempt at firmer confirmation, the interviewers asked for death certificates in 78 households and were provided them 63 times.
There were 46 deaths in the surveyed households before the war.   After the invasion, there were 142 deaths.
That is an increase from 5 deaths per 1,000 people per year to 12.3 per 1,000 people per year — more than double.
However, more than a third of the post-invasion deaths were reported in one cluster of households in the city Fallujah, where fighting has been most intense recently.
Because the fighting was so severe there, the numbers from that location may have exaggerated the overall picture.
When the researchers recalculated the effect of the war without the statistics from Fallujah, the deaths end up at 7.9 per 1,000 people per year — still 1.5 times higher than before the war.
Even with Fallujah factored out, the survey "indicates that the death toll associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq is more likely than not about 100,000 people, and may be much higher," the report said.
The most common causes of death before the invasion of Iraq were heart attacks, strokes and other chronic diseases.  However, after the invasion, violence was recorded as the primary cause of death and was mainly attributed to coalition forces — with about 95 percent of those deaths caused by bombs or fire from helicopter gunships.
Violent deaths — defined as those brought about by the intentional act of others — were reported in 15 of the 33 clusters.  The chances of a violent death were 58 times higher after the invasion than before it, the researchers said.
Twelve of the 73 violent deaths were not attributed to coalition forces.  The researchers said 28 children were killed by coalition forces in the survey households.  Infant mortality rose from 29 deaths per 1,000 live births before the war to 57 deaths per 1,000 afterward.
The researchers estimated the nationwide death toll due to the conflict by subtracting the preinvasion death rate from the post-invasion death rate and multiplying that number by the estimated population of Iraq — 24.4 million at the start of the war.  Then that number was converted to a total number of deaths by dividing by 1,000 and adjusting for the 18 months since the invasion.
"We estimate that there were 98,000 extra deaths during the postwar period in the 97 percent of Iraq represented by all the clusters except Fallujah," the researchers said in the journal.
"This isn't about individual soldiers doing bad things.  This appears to be a problem with the approach to occupation in Iraq," Roberts said.
The researchers called for further confirmation by an independent body such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, or the World Health Organization.
The study was funded by the Center for International Emergency Disaster and Refugee Studies at Johns Hopkins University and by the Small Arms Survey in Geneva, Switzerland, a research project based at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.
Survey claims 37,000 Iraqi civilians killed in first seven months of war
By James Conachy
5 August 2004
An Iraqi political organization, the People’s Kifah or Struggle Against Hegemony, told the Arab network Al Jazeera on the weekend that it had documented more than 37,000 civilian deaths in Iraq in the seven months from the start of the US war on March 20,2003, through October 2003.
A spokesman for the People’s Kifah, Muhammad al-Ubaidi, told Al Jazeera they were “100percent sure” the estimate was correct.
U.S. military occupation for oil tank
Baghdad   Iraq
The data was gathered during September and October 2003, when the organization undertook a nationwide survey “involving hundreds of Iraqi activists and academics.”
Ubaidi stated: “For the collation of our statistics we visited the most remote villages, spoke and coordinated with grave-diggers across Iraq, obtained information from hospitals and spoke to thousands of witnesses who saw incidents in which Iraqi civilians were killed by US fire.”
The People’s Kifah claims it halted the survey under duress, after one of the group’s workers, Ramzi Musa Ahmad, was seized by Kurdish militiamen last October and handed over to US troops.
He has been missing ever since.
According to the statements of the organization, the figure of 37,000 does not include the casualties suffered by Iraqi military and paramilitary forces.
The estimates of Iraqi military deaths during the invasion range from approximately 10, 000 to as many as 45,000.
As the study concluded last October, it also does not include the large numbers of civilian casualties inflicted by the US military in April and May, during its operations to crush the Iraqi uprising in Fallujah and Baghdad and across southern Iraq.
Thus far, only limited details of the survey have been released, and its methodology does not appear to have been subjected to independent scrutiny.
It warrants attention, however, because no official survey into the number of civilian casualties has been carried out in Iraq since the occupation began.
The US military refuses to make public its own estimate of how many Iraqi civilians it killed during the invasion.   Last December, the head of the statistics department of the Iraqi health ministry alleged a study it was conducting was shut down on the orders of the US-controlled Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).
US occupation for oil nighttime
Baghdad
At the time, both the CPA and the US-installed Iraqi Governing Council denied any survey was being conducted.
Though there are no official figures on casualties, what is known is that the US military unleashed massive firepower during the invasion of Iraq.
The ongoing occupation has been marked by the systematic repression of the Iraqi people in an effort to force them to bow down to the neo-colonial US control of the country and its resources.
According to figures released last year by the US military, some 800 cruise missiles, more than 18,000 precision-guided bombs and missiles, and some 9,000 “dumb” bombs were unleashed on Iraq during the invasion.
At least 1,200 cluster bombs were dropped
At least 1,200 cluster bombs were dropped, each releasing dozens of small grenade-like bomblets.
A-10 “Warthog” ground-support aircraft fired an estimated 300,000 rounds from their 30 mm cannons — many of which are believed to have been manufactured from depleted uranium (DU).
Tens of thousands of tank and ground artillery rounds, including DU rounds, and vast numbers of machine-gun and small-arms munitions were also expended.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved 50 air strikes that US military planners had estimated in advance would kill 30 or more civilians.
Fifty strikes were also launched to kill “high-value” Iraqi military and political leaders, mostly in Baghdad, before which no estimate was even made of likely civilian deaths.
None of them hit their intended targets, and the few that have been investigated all resulted in civilian losses.
The People’s Kifah survey claims to have documented 6,103 civilian deaths in Baghdad province from the beginning of the war through October.
Large numbers of civilians killed during US tank assaults into city
Iraq’s capital suffered the heaviest aerial bombardment by American and allied aircraft, and large numbers of civilians were killed during the US tank assaults into the city from April 3 to April9.
Between May and October2003, Human Rights Watch collected what it called credible reports of 94 civilian deaths in Baghdad at the hands of American troops.
These included people gunned down in their cars as they approached checkpoints, shot during raids, or hit by indiscriminate US fire in the street.
In the province of Basra, which has been under British control since the end of the war, the survey claims to have documented 6,734 civilian deaths.
The city of Basra, Iraq’s second largest, was subjected to a fierce bombardment and siege by US and British troops in the first week of the war.
Three hospitals in the city recorded 413 deaths during the invasion, but this figure did not include those who did not die in hospital or who were not taken to hospital morgues.
In Babil province 3,552 civilians killed
In Babil province, of which Hilla is the capital, the survey claims 3,552 civilians were killed.
During the invasion, an International Red Cross representative, Roland Hugenin, told journalists from Hilla hospital that “there has been an incredible number of casualties with very, very serious wounds in the region of Hilla.
We saw that a truck was delivering dozens of totally dismembered dead bodies of women and children.”
The survey claims 3,581 civilians died in the province of Nasiriya — another scene of intense fighting during the invasion.
Handcuffs left behind by U.S. military occupation for oil forces
Amil   Iraq
It claims more than 2,000 civilian deaths in other southern provinces such as Misan, Karbala and Wasit; the northern province of Mosul; and the western province of al-Anbar, which includes the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi.
No figures were reportedly gathered in the three predominantly Kurdish northern provinces of the country.
The figure of 37,000 deaths is far higher than the estimate of civilian casualties arrived at by relying upon media accounts.
As of August 4, the Iraq Body Count web site (www.iraqbodycount.net) had data-base reports that show a minimum of 11,429, and a maximum of 13,398 Iraqi civilians have been killed in Iraq since March 20,2003.
A disclaimer on the site reads, however: “We are not a news organization ourselves and like everyone else can only base our information on what has been reported so far.
What we are attempting to provide is a credible compilation of civilian deaths that have been reported by recognized sources.
Our maximum therefore refers to reported deaths — which can only be a sample of true deaths unless one assumes that every civilian death has been reported.
It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media.
That is the sad nature of war” (emphasis in the original).
The true figure of Iraqi civilian casualties is therefore likely to be closer to that arrived at by the People’s Kifah survey.
The scale of the death and destruction resulting from the US invasion of Iraq underscores the criminality of those responsible for planning and organizing the war, and those advocating the continuation of the occupation.
        See Also:
        US uses cluster bombs to spread death and destruction in Iraq
        [5 April 2003]
        US rampage through Baghdad kills thousands
        [7 April 2003]
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World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
BANALITY, BOMBAST, AND BLOOD
John Chuckman
June 3, 2003
Generally in wars, total casualties, which include wounded, crippled, and lost, are many times the number killed, often as high as ten times.
I do not know what the appropriate ratio is for Iraq, but it's not hard to see that the United States killed and hurt a great many innocent people in a few weeks of "precision" war.
Of military losses, poor boys drafted to defend their homes, we as yet have no good estimate.
US occupation for oil
Baghdad  July, 2007
In the first Gulf War, between sixty and one hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers were slaughtered.
With Iraq's population being less than ten percent that of the United States, such losses must be multiplied by ten to get some feel for their impact on the society.
So while Americans, thirty years later, still weep at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington — a monument representing about sixty thousand deaths over ten years of war — they have inflicted on Iraq, in just three weeks, that same proportionate loss — all of them civilians.
The one-sided slaughter of soldiers in the first Gulf War represented the equivalent of the U.S. having sustained between half a million and a million deaths just over a decade ago.
No society recovers easily from such losses of its youth.
Ms. Ruzicka runs a non-profit organization that works to make accurate counts of a war's civilian dead.
Ms. Ruzicka says that between five and ten thousand civilians were killed.
In a real war, a war in which most people agree there is some powerful motivating cause, the fate of an individual soldier becomes almost unimportant.
Soldiers in real wars are reduced to just about the status of soldier-ants in a war between two ant-nests.
But the public can be mercurial when it comes to invasions with flimsy excuses and gas-bag ideology.
Public support can shift quickly or melt away entirely, so a little juicing-up may be prescribed.
Besides, when there is almost no real news being reported, as was true in America for Iraq, you need a little something to satisfy the chips-and-television crowd anxious to be informed from their couches.
Since America's modern warriors are limited to follow-up after missiles and bombs have reduced everything to a vision of hell, much of the touching stuff that once inspired the home front is missing.
There are no more pitiful and tragic images of young Americans falling in what seems a worthy cause.
So the Pentagon's prisoner-liberation simulation, like its staged statue-toppling in Baghdad, so suggestive of news photos at end of World War Two, served several purposes.
Is this how a great power behaves in the early part of the 21st century?
Especially a power that enjoys reminding us at every opportunity — I suppose because it is so easy for the rest of the world, just watching its actions, to forget — that America stands for human rights and democratic principles?
Yes, unfortunately, that is exactly how it behaves.
Only, the complete picture is bleaker still.
Mr. Bush at the G-8 summit in Evian, France — a summit he considered not even attending and at which, in any event, he cut short his stay — made an effort at grand-poohbah statesman with, "We can have disagreements, but that doesn't mean we have to be disagreeable," a lifelessly trite line, but one certainly ranking at the peak of this President's eloquence.
US destroyed vehicle
Sadr City
July, 2007
Just a few days before (May 30), Bush abandoned the session with reporters that customarily precedes a G-8 summit, perhaps reflecting advisors' concerns that he would blow it with his anger when questioned about recent events.
He left the session for his tactful National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, to blow.
On the subject of Canada, Ms. Rice gave us, "I think there was disappointment in the United States that a friend like Canada was unable to support the United States in what we considered to be an extremely important issue for our security [Emphasis is mine]."
Does Ms. Rice read the newspaper?
Her words about security come within days of reports of an interview with the Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz in which he admits the business about weapons was an excuse for invading Iraq.
His admission only punctuated weeks of reports about American forces not finding anything remotely suspicious and America's hack chorus of national columnists swelling their breasts to a theme about weapons not being important after all.
Canada has never stinted in helping Americans.
Canada is the kind of neighbor any sensible people would want.
But helping a scheme for "regime change" in someone else's country, unsupported by international law, is not quite the same thing as helping Americans.
Canada was never called a poor friend for not helping in the many shadowy "regime changes" the United States has conducted across the Caribbean and Latin America.
Canada's values and interests do not lie that way.
Why was the situation suddenly so different for an unthreatening small country on the other side of the planet?
The tough answer is that the United States government felt alone and naked in what it was doing over Iraq.
It desperately sought international approval, which it did not get, leaving the harsh ideologues in the White House both embarrassed and angry at being embarrassed.
Ms. Rice went on to say differences with Canada had put bilateral relations through "some difficult times," and "that disappointment will, of course, not go [away] easily.
It will take some time, because when friends are in a position where we say our security's at stake, we would have thought, as we got from many of our friends, that the answer would have been, 'Well, how can we help?' "
There were times when it appeared that American power was seen to be more dangerous than perhaps Saddam Hussein," Ms. Rice said
Does any honest person reading her words find them in keeping with Bush's G-8 stuff about "not being disagreeable"?
They are clearly disagreeable, provocative, and even petty.
But Ms. Rice went even further concerning Germany, "I can't answer the question of whether personal relations between the President and the Chancellor will ever be the same.   We will have to see."
As for France, "there were times when it appeared that American power was seen to be more dangerous than perhaps Saddam Hussein," Ms. Rice said.
Protest against US occupation for oil
Baghdad  July, 2007
"I'll just put it very bluntly, we simply didn't understand it."
Well, to put it also very bluntly, American power, when it is used to bully others, in fact is more dangerous, far more dangerous, than Saddam Hussein ever was.
"We have been allies in great struggles in world wars," Ms. Rice said of the French.
"The United States gave its blood to liberate France."
The United States gave its blood to defeat rivals Germany and Japan.
Liberating countries like France was incidental, although the French have always scrupulously, respectfully maintained America's battlefield cemeteries and commemorated America's efforts as few others do.
The historical fact is President Roosevelt considered governing postwar France in a very high-handed manner.
He pretty much detested De Gaulle, and France's empire was something the Roosevelt people never stopped sneering at and preaching about while merrily working to build one of their own.
The situation was far murkier and less heroic than Ms. Rice would have you understand, but her purpose was to put another country on the defensive, not to teach history.
Are the world's statesmen so dense they do not understand true danger when they see it?
Do they deliberately embrace evil?
Of course not.
Then, why Ms. Rice's language if the need for invading Iraq was clear?
Precisely because the need was not clear, and it has only become even less clear now.
Manipulative language here is a substitute for thought — we are given a form of aggressive marketing rather than an honest product — a practice to which this administration is addicted.
Just a week before the G-8 summit, another Bush-administration bully, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, gave us his version of "not being disagreeable."
Rumsfeld informed the French air force that it would not be welcome at two upcoming international exercises.
Rumsfeld's version of "not being disagreeable" included declaring that the United States would heavily cut its involvement with the Paris Air Show, traditionally the world's most important show for aviation technology.
As a Pentagon official so agreeably put it, "With troops eating military rations in the dust in Iraq, it's not appropriate for officers to be wined and dined in Paris."
Doesn't that sound reasonable?
So, do you think they've stopped wining and dining in expensive Georgetown restaurants over all the fat new Pentagon contracts being handed out these days?
Or do they just quietly put aside that disagreeable stuff about dust and rations on such happy occasions?
Do you think they served military freeze-dried rations at the President's recent $18-million dollar fundraiser?
America's top diplomat, that disappointing baritone of dissimulation, Colin Powell, has gone around for weeks uttering threats and slights towards France.
A couple of weeks ago, he said the United States would reconsider its links with France following disagreement over Iraq.
Does that sound anything like being "not disagreeable"?
On CBC Radio some weeks ago, there was a fascinating little story.
There is a manufacturer in Quebec who actually makes some of the fancy cowboy boots beloved in Texas.
During the height of American irritation over Iraq, this boot-maker was asked by his Texas customer to supply a written statement that he did not personally support Canada's policy towards war in Iraq.
Can you imagine an American's furious response at being asked such an inappropriate, private, personal matter in a business transaction?
In effect, he was asked to supply a kind of pledge of allegiance to someone else's foreign policy.
Something corrupt, dirty, and destructive is taking hold of America, choking even ordinary business with the sewerage of ideology.
How does one talk of neighborliness, love of freedom, or democratic-mindedness while behaving like a blackmailer?
Copyright (c) Scoop Media
 
Iraq, April 2007
4 years after occupation for oil
Almost a million dead
4 million displaced, scattered into other countries
Untold injured
Horror of US UK invasion continuing
Sadriya market, Baghdad, Iraq Photo: BBC/AFP
Sadriya market, Baghdad, Iraq
uruknet.info
اوروكنت.إنفو
informazione dall'iraq occupato
information from occupied iraq
أخبار منالعراق المحتلة
A Baathist looks at the big picture
Arablinks.blogspot.com
From the blowing up of bridges to the attempts to split the resistance: what's going on in Iraq?
April 18, 2007
Salah al-Mukhtar was a prominent Baathist in the late Saddam era, serving in diplomatic positions in India, Vietnam and the UN, and although he doesn't have an official position currently, he often comments on the Iraq war from a Baathist perspective.
This article was published on the resistance website albasrah.net April 15, and a commenter suggested this would be a good introduction to a point of view that doesn't get much coverage here in the anglosphere. And it is hard to argue with that.
One of his major points is that it seems to him that at the point when the Americans realized they were in trouble militarily, they came up with the idea of covertly helping the takfiris attack other Iraqis, as a way of helping turn the war against the occupation into an Iraqi-on-Iraqi war. Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, this writer implies, without mentioning the name, is a likely a nobody who rose to prominence with covert American aid.
His title is "From the blowing up of bridges to the attempts to split the resistance: what's going on in Iraq?"
Al-Mukhtar begins by talking about the recent blowing up of two major bridges over the Tigris in Baghdad, and the intensified popular sense of foreboding this caused, because it suggests to people the idea of Iraqi partition extending to the heart of Baghdad, and it suggests too the idea that there are some with a strategy of not leaving stone upon stone, and finishing the work of destruction that the Americans began.
The American Mukhabarat has undertaken another project, this one with the clear support of Iran
He then segues to the execution of Saddam and his associates, with its "artificial creation of a sectarian atmosphere", the idea being that these apparently separate events, and many others, are part and parcel of a scheme to foster sectarian warfare, split the resistance, and weaken the country to the point where the occupation can succeed.
The Saddam execution was followed by an attempt by a group in Syria to split the Baath, and American-led persecution of the Party and its members and supporters throughout Iraq. The writer goes on:
And in addition to the attempts to attack the name of the [Baath] Party, the American Mukhabarat has undertaken another project, this one with the clear support of Iran, whether by direct arrangement or by a meeting of the minds, namely the plan to cause fighting between factions of the Iraqi jihad, by encouraging Islamist takfiris within some of the factions to announce their intention to monopolize, from now on, the control of Iraq or at least of the field of jihad, giving the other factions the choice of having their necks cut, or pledging allegiance to them and proceeding under their leadership — and that even though they only represented a small group!
Likewise other members took to applying takfir to the progressive and arabist nationalist factions.
...And they went so far as to kill dozens of military cadres fighting against the occupation from among the Baathists and arabists, for the purpose of igniting a fight among the jihadi factions, serving in this way the primary purpose of America and Iran, namely the division of the Iraqi resistance, because that is the basic prerequisite for turning the American defeat in Iraq into victory.
'Moles'
The writer then explains the meaning of the expression "moles" in organizations like these.
And he says what has been going on is this:
(The Americans) Once they understood that they had well and truly fallen into the Iraqi trap, from which they wouldn't emerge safely unless they could come up with an elaborately thought-out scheme, started putting moles in specific factions, and via these moles they offered the groups generous material and PR support.
This enhanced the credibility of these moles, and raised their profile and role within these factions, and some of them came to have leadership roles within those factions.
Without mentioning names, it is pretty clear he is referring to people like Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, a person no one had ever heard of before, who suddenly emerged as the emir of the Islamic State of Iraq.
Overlooking this role of agents, the writer says, would be a fateful error no matter how you look at it. And he asks:
Are Allawi, Hakim, Chalabi the only agents?
Why is it that there was never, ever, any disclosure of any new American agents after the original disclosure of the roles of the old agents Allawi, Hakim, Chalabi and the others?
Are they the only agents, or are their other agents who are more important because they operate within the national ranks and haven't been exposed yet?
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Waits for body of father
A Baathist looks at the big picture
Arablinks.blogspot.com
The writer then compares the role of moles in the jihadi organizations to that of Iran in the macro picture, in the sense that Iran
...appears with the appearance of opposing America for the good of the cause of Islam and Palestine...
[but] this is in preparation for dividing [Iraqis and Palestinians] and changing the fight from a fight for liberation against America and Israel, into sectarian fights between muslims, instead of focusing all guns on the Zionists and the Americans.
As far as Iraq is concerned, the writer says, the result has been that most attacks carried out by these groups are now against Iraqis, Shiite and Sunni, and not against the occupation forces except peripherally.
America has spent a lot on this war, and that in Afghanistan, but since success would give them control over the world's major oil reserves, and and with it a global dictatorship, the price will have been cheap considering the result.
It would be naive, the writer says, to think that everyone who fights America or Israel in Iraq or in Palestine is necessarily engaged in struggle or jihad.
Because you have to look at the final result, and not at half-way results.
You can't judge military efforts against the occupation except in the light of real aims and real results, and the one necessary condition for victory in Iraq is maintenance of the unity of the resistance, just as the one necessary condition for the occupation to succeed is to split the resistance.
Damaged Humvee
The writer offers a couple of observations in conclusion:
The first observation is that at the same time that the American Mukhabarat toughens its campaign against the Baath by various means...
[including] its extreme efforts to dry up the sources of funding for the Party and its resistance, and its arrest of tens of thousands of its fighters and mujahideen, at the same time it is making life easier in a remarkable way for the sectarian Sunni takfiris, offering them financial and military support, whether directly, or channeled via the Gulf, and this at a time when their takfir is being intensified against the nationalists and the patriots and the true Islamists....
People shouldn't lose sight of this for even a moment, the writer says, because what this American strategy amounts to as an attempt to change the war from one against the occupation to a sectarian Shiite-Sunni war, which will not stop until the sectarian takfiri power is the dominant one in Iraq.
Baghdad
And this is particularly ungent for Baathists to understand, because the first requisite for this American strategy is the crushing of the Baath Party, conceptually, organizationally, financially.
Because the Baath is the only nationalist party that covers all of Iraq and includes Sunnis, Shiites and others.
His second concluding observation is that Iran, even though it is naturally an enemy of the Sunni takfiris, still provides them with support and assistance in their attacks on Iraqi Shiites.
The reason is to make the Iraqi Shiites side with Iran, in a way that will ultimately further feed the conversion of this war into a sectarian one, in order to weaken the country.
 
Vietnam verses Iraq American military deaths. Vietnam American military deaths in year 1961 - 16 Vietnam American military deaths in year 1962 - 52 Vietnam American military deaths in year 1963 - 118 Vietnam American military deaths in year 1964 - 206 Vietnam American military deaths in year 1965 - 1863 Vietnam American military deaths in year 1966 - 6143 Vietnam American military deaths in year 1967 - 11,153 Iraq American military deaths in year 2003 - 486 Iraq American military deaths in year 2004 - 848 Iraq American military deaths in year 2005 - 846 Iraq American military deaths in year 2006 to November 17 2006 - 684 Graph: www.Huffingtonpost.com
Vietnam verses Iraq American military deaths.
Vietnam American military deaths in year 1961 — 16
Vietnam American military deaths in year 1962 — 52
Vietnam American military deaths in year 1963 — 118
Vietnam American military deaths in year 1964 — 206
Vietnam American military deaths in year 1965 — 1863
Vietnam American military deaths in year 1966 — 6143
Vietnam American military deaths in year 1967 — 11,153
Vietnam American battle deaths 1964 to 1975 — 47,410
In addition 10,000 deaths of American young men in Vietnam are listed as 'other'
Iraq American military deaths in year 2003 — 486
Iraq American military deaths in year 2004 — 848
Iraq American military deaths in year 2005 — 846
Iraq American military deaths in year 2006 to November 17 2006 — 684
New World Order Statistics of Human Misery of Soldiers and Military that fight for the 'Order'
('The West' and their lackey's Warfare)
Excluding Somalia and various other secret engagements
icasualties.org
Of the 2,449 coalition deaths in Afghanistan:
1,571 have been American
23 Australia
One Belgium
155 Canada
Three Czech
40 Denmark
Eight Estonia
Two Finland
56 France
Seven Georgia
49 Germany
Four Hungary
36 Italy
One Jordan
Three Latvia
One Lithuania
25 Netherlands
3 Unidentified as to country NATO
Two New Zealand
10 Norway
26 Poland
Two Portugal
19 Romania
One South Korea
30 Spain
Five Sweden
Two Turkey
364 UK
To May 11, 2011
These figures are 'Battle deaths' and do not include deaths that take place as early as two or three weeks outside the Afghanistan war zones when seriously injured troops are shipped to their home country, or in the situation with the US military to some hospital on a military base in another country.
These figures do not include suicide of soldiers who have returned home, or the killing and injuring of loved ones and others outside the family, by soldiers with mental impairment who have returned home.
At least 10,468 U.S. personnel have been wounded in action, according to the Pentagon.
      U.S. & Coalition/Casualties     
      in Afghanistan occupation      
Of the 4,770 coalition deaths in Iraq:
4,452 have been Americans
Two Australia
One Azerbaijan
Thirteen Bulgaria
One Czech Republic
Seven Denmark
5 El Salvador
Two Estonia
One Fiji
Five Georgia
One Hungary
33 Italy
One Kazakhstan
Three Latvia
Two Netherlands
23 Poland
Three Romania
Four Slovakia
One South Korea
11 Spain
Two Thailand
Eighteen Ukraine
179 UK
To May 11, 2011
These figures are 'Battle deaths' and do not include deaths that take place outside Iraq war zones, as early as two or three weeks, after seriously injured troops are shipped to their home country, or in the situation with the US military to some hospital on a military base in another country.
— other coalition deaths are estimated at up to 10,000 deaths including contract people brought into Iraq by coalition forces.
These figures do not include suicide of soldiers who have returned home, or the killing and injuring of loved ones and others outside the family, by soldiers with mental impairment who have returned home.
At least 32,049 U.S. troops have been wounded in action, according to the Pentagon.
      U.S. & Coalition/Casualties     
      in Iraq occupation                     
 
       If Only They'd Hissed Barack Obama —       
       US military —        
       Massacres and atrocities detailed —        
       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.  
BEHIND THE SCENE
Loup de Loup: The Deeper Darkness
Chris Floyd — www.chris-floyd.com
 ...If the neocons all hopped a spaceship for the Hale-Bopp comet tomorrow — indeed, if the cult had never arisen at all — we would still be right where we are today: neck-deep in the Big Muddy.
That's not to say, of course, that we weren't misled into Iraq, or that strings aren't being pulled for a war on Iran, or that flames aren't being fanned to widen the Middle East war — or that the gaggle of third-rate thinkers and first-class troublemakers loosely grouped under the rubric "neocon" aren't intimately involved in all of these affairs.
They are, in spades.
But to accuse them of playing the central role in America's on-going Gõtterdõmmerung gives them an importance they don't deserve — and unduly mitigates the guilt of the true culprits:
The good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon boardroom buccaneers of the American Establishment, bred for generations to feast on war and rumors of war, and to regard the hoi polloi as mere cannon fodder and cash cows to be mulched and milked as needed.
For what's the underlying implication of the "neocons über alles" meme?
It's that hard-core, down-and-dirty inside operators like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — who have spent their entire adult lives at the dark heart of the government-corporate-warbiz-spygame power nexus — are actually innocent lambkins led astray by the wicked blandishments of Richard Perle.
It's that the world-striding oil barons, Wall Street dynasts and CIA scions of the Bush Faction are just wide-eyed rubes bamboozled into acting against their own interests by the dazzling sophistry of William Kristol and Michael Leeden.
It's that no U.S. administration would ever undertake the kind of rapacious policies we've seen in the last five years — unless they'd been tricked into it by wily Zionists and their ideological outriders.
It is, in short, our old friend "American exceptionalism," decked out in dissident drag.
Shakespeare pegged the neo-cons' true place in the scheme of things more than 400 years ago in Julius Caesar.
Listen to Marc Antony dismissing his fellow triumvir Lepidus, and you will hear the authentic voice of Great Gamesters like Cheney, Rumsfeld and James Baker, dicing for world empire and using anything at hand — neo-cons, evangelicals, Caucasian despots, Arab tyrants, Israeli proxies, British lapdogs, Shiite death squads — to further their ambitions:
"This is a slight unmeritable man, meet to be sent on errands.
...and though we lay these honours on this man, to ease ourselves of divers slanderous loads, he shall but bear them as the ass bears gold, to groan and sweat under the business, either led or driven as we point the way.
And having brought our treasure where we will, then we take down his load and turn him off, like to the empty ass, to shake his ears and graze in commons."
Or at the World Bank, as the case may be.
Again, this is not to deny that neocon fingerprints are all over the various shivs and bludgeons that the Bush Regime has used in its whack jobs on the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, the Magna Carta and the Ten Commandments.
After all, the veritable blueprint for the whole godawful shebang — the infamous "Rebuilding America's Defenses" document of September 2000 — was concocted under the aegis of that quintessentially neocon think tank, the Project for the New American Century.
...But without the presence of long-time Establishment power players like Cheney and Rumsfeld on the PNAC board, the plan would have remained the pipe dream of a few curdled academics and comb-licking policy wonks.
Indeed, it was the Great Gamesters themselves who set the neocons to work on devising ways to extend the "unipolar moment" of unchallenged American power that arose after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The first version of the PNAC plan was drawn up at Cheney's order by Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter "Leaker" Libby in 1992, in the last months of the Bush I administration.
Under Bush II, the neocons were brought in as shock troops.
Their mindless zealotry was a perfect tool for implementing the plans drawn up by the real players in the new regime: Cheney's notorious "Energy Task Force" and the much lesser-known "Joint Task Force on Petroleum" formed by the Council on Foreign Relations and — who else? — the James Baker Institute at Rice University.
It was here that the final solution for Iraq was hammered out...
These are dark days, serious times.
The whiff of apocalypse is in the air.
For it will be virtually impossible for the Gamesters to carry off their next immediate goal, subduing Iran — much less their long-range aim of dominating the world throughout a "new American century" — without the use of nuclear weapons.
So let's be done with the comforting fairy tale that the vast crimes we are witnessing are the work of a few cranks who have somehow hijacked the noble U.S. government and are using it for their own purposes, or Israel's purposes, or whatever.
The reality is that Iraq was invaded because a powerful faction of the old-line American Establishment wanted to do it and the rest of the Establishment — the Democrats, the media, the "respectable" intelligentsia — countenanced the crime.
The belligerence and oppression that the Israeli government is inflicting in Lebanon and Palestine are receiving unquestioned — and armed — support from the United States because this suits the larger strategic purposes of the "global dominance" faction of the Establishment, and the domestic political purposes both of the Democrats, heavily reliant on Jewish-American backing, and the Republicans, dependent on their rabidly pro-Israel evangelical base.
[As many others have pointed out, whenever the Israelis try to do something that the American elite don't like -- such as sell sophisticated military technology to the Chinese — they are called on the carpet and forced to back down. ]
It is the American elite — pursuing, as always, the enhancement of its own power and privilege, heedless of the consent of the governed or the genuine interests of the American people (or the Palestinian people or the Israeli people or the Lebanese people or the Iraqi people) — that bedevils us.
The emergence of the cretinous neoconservative cult is just a symptom of a deeper moral corruption coursing through the dominant institutions and structures of American society.
The body politic is rotting from the head.
     INDEX ON IRAQ: A JOURNEY IN HELL      
      Sarah Meyer, INDEX RESEARCH       
     US UK created Iraq      
      — Death Squads — Devastated cities       
Connections that lead directly to the heart of the Downing Street Letters:
Blair's lies to the UK parliament and UK people.
Lies central to the US claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking weapons of mass destruction.
Lies that missiles could get to London in 4 minutes.
Lies serving as a basis for the Iraq invasion less than two months later.
April 10th, 2007
EXCLUSIVE…Two Explosive Books Tell the Inside Story of the Forged Iraq-Niger Docs That Helped Build the Case for War — Click Here
In his January 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush declared the infamous sixteen words: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
The claim was central to the administration’s claims that Saddam Hussein was seeking weapons of mass destruction and served as a basis for launching the Iraq invasion less than two months later.
Bush’s declaration was based on an intelligence document that provided evidence about Iraq’s purchase of uranium from the African country of Niger.
But there was one problem: the document was a fake.
In a Democracy Now! broadcast exclusive, we speak with the authors of two explosive new books.
Carlo Bonini is the Italian reporter who broke the Niger story.
His new book is called “Collusion: International Espionage and the War on Terror.”
Peter Eisner is a veteran foreign correspondent and is currently an editor at the Washington Post.
His new book is “The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq.”
“Inside Downing Street Tony Blair had gathered some of his senior ministers and advisers for a pivotal meeting in the build-up to the Iraq war.
It was 9am on July 23, 2002, eight months before the invasion began and long before the public was told war was inevitable.”
            Britain's Queen Elizabeth walks with U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the ceremonial welcome on the first day of Bush's state visit to the UK at London's Buckingham Palace, November 19, 2003. Photo: REUTERS/POOL/Kirsty Wigglesworth, 11/20/03
Strategy of disguised redistribution of national resources from the bottom to the top is carried out by a combination of:
(a) drastic hikes in the Pentagon budget
(b) equally drastic tax cuts for the wealthy.
THE BIG LIE
Sep 22 2003
JOHN PILGER REVEALS WMDs WERE JUST A PRETEXT FOR PLANNED WAR ON IRAQ
John Pilger
EXACTLY one year ago, Tony Blair told Parliament: "Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and growing.
"The policy of containment is not working.   The weapons of mass destruction programme is not shut down.   It is up and running now."
Not only was every word of this false, it was part of a big lie invented in Washington within hours of the attacks of September 11 2001 and used to hoodwink the American public and distract the media from the real reason for attacking Iraq.   "It was 95 per cent charade," a former senior CIA analyst told me.
An investigation of files and archive film for my TV documentary Breaking The Silence, together with interviews with former intelligence officers and senior Bush officials have revealed that Bush and Blair knew all along that Saddam Hussein was effectively disarmed.
Both Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, and Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's closest adviser, made clear before September 11 2001 that Saddam Hussein was no threat - to America, Europe or the Middle East.
In Cairo, on February 24 2001, Powell said: "He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction.   He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours."
This is the very opposite of what Bush and Blair said in public.
Powell even boasted that it was the US policy of "containment" that had effectively disarmed the Iraqi dictator - again the very opposite of what Blair said time and again.   On May 15 2001, Powell went further and said that Saddam Hussein had not been able to "build his military back up or to develop weapons of mass destruction" for "the last 10 years".   America, he said, had been successful in keeping him "in a box".
Two months later, Condoleezza Rice also described a weak, divided and militarily defenceless Iraq.   "Saddam does not control the northern part of the country," she said.   "We are able to keep his arms from him.   His military forces have not been rebuilt."
So here were two of Bush's most important officials putting the lie to their own propaganda, and the Blair government's propaganda that subsequently provided the justification for an unprovoked, illegal attack on Iraq.
The result was the deaths of what reliable studies now put at 50,000 people, civilians and mostly conscript Iraqi soldiers, as well as British and American troops.
There is no estimate of the countless thousands of wounded.
The result was the deaths of what reliable studies now put at 50,000 people, civilians and mostly conscript Iraqi soldiers, as well as British and American troops.   There is no estimate of the countless thousands of wounded.
In a torrent of propaganda seeking to justify this violence before and during the invasion, there were occasional truths that never made headlines.   In April last year, Condoleezza Rice described September 11 2001 as an "enormous opportunity" and said America "must move to take advantage of these new opportunities."
Taking over Iraq, the world's second biggest oil producer, was the first such opportunity.
At 2.40pm on September 11, according to confidential notes taken by his aides, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, said he wanted to "hit" Iraq - even though not a shred of evidence existed that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the attacks on New York and Washington.   "Go massive," the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying.   "Sweep it all up.   Things related and not."   Iraq was given a brief reprieve when it was decided instead to attack Afghanistan.   This was the "softest option" and easiest to explain to the American people - even though not a single September 11 hijacker came from Afghanistan.   In the meantime, securing the "big prize", Iraq, became an obsession in both Washington and London.
An Office of Special Plans was hurriedly set up in the Pentagon for the sole purpose of converting "loose" or unsubstantiated intelligence into US policy.   This was a source from which Downing Street received much of the "evidence" of weapons of mass destruction we now know to be phoney.
CONTRARY to Blair's denials at the time, the decision to attack Iraq was set in motion on September 17 2001, just six days after the attacks on New York and Washington.
On that day, Bush signed a top- secret directive, ordering the Pentagon to begin planning "military options" for an invasion of Iraq.   In July 2002, Condoleezza Rice told another Bush official who had voiced doubts about invading Iraq: "A decision has been made.   Don't waste your breath."
The ultimate cynicism of this cover-up was expressed by Rumsfeld himself only last week.   When asked why he thought most Americans still believed Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks of September 11, he replied: "I've not seen any indication that would lead me to believe I could say that."
It is this that makes the Hutton inquiry in London virtually a sham.   By setting up an inquiry solely into the death of the weapons expert David Kelly, Blair has ensured there will be no official public investigation into the real reasons he and Bush attacked Iraq and into when exactly they made that decision.   He has ensured there will be no headlines about disclosures in email traffic between Downing Street and the White House, only secretive tittle-tattle from Whitehall and the smearing of the messenger of Blair's misdeeds.
The sheer scale of this cover-up makes almost laughable the forensic cross-examination of the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan about "anomalies" in the notes of his interview with David Kelly - when the story Gilligan told of government hypocrisy and deception was basically true.
Those pontificating about Gilligan failed to ask one vital question - why has Lord Hutton not recalled Tony Blair for cross-examination?   Why is Blair not being asked why British sovereignty has been handed over to a gang in Washington whose extremism is no longer doubted by even the most conservative observers?   No one knows the Bush extremists better than Ray McGovern, a former senior CIA officer and personal friend of George Bush senior, the President's father.   In Breaking The Silence, he tells me: "They were referred to in the circles in which I moved when I was briefing at the top policy levels as 'the crazies'."
"Who referred to them as 'the crazies'?" I asked.
"All of us... in policy circles as well as intelligence circles... There is plenty of documented evidence that they have been planning these attacks for a long time and that 9/11 accelerated their plan.   (The weapons of mass destruction issue) was all contrived, so was the connection of Iraq with al Qaeda.   It was all PR... Josef Goebbels had this dictum: If you say something often enough, the people will believe it."   He added: "I think we ought to be all worried about fascism (in the United States)."
The "crazies" include John Bolton, Under Secretary of State, who has made a personal mission of tearing up missile treaties with the Russians and threatening North Korea, and Douglas Feith, an Under Secretary of Defence, who ran a secret propaganda unit "reworking" intelligence about Iraq's weapons.   I interviewed them both in Washington.
BOLTON boasted to me that the killing of as many as 10,000 Iraqi civilians in the invasion was "quite low if you look at the size of the military operation."
For raising the question of civilian casualties and asking which country America might attack next, I was told: "You must be a member of the Communist Party."
Over at the Pentagon, Feith, No 3 to Rumsfeld, spoke about the "precision" of American weapons and denied that many civilians had been killed.   When I pressed him, an army colonel ordered my cameraman: "Stop the tape!" In Washington, the wholesale deaths of Iraqis is unmentionable.   They are non-people; the more they resist the Anglo-American occupation, the more they are dismissed as "terrorists".
It is this slaughter in Iraq, a crime by any interpretation of an international law, that makes the Hutton inquiry absurd.   While his lordship and the barristers play their semantic games, the spectre of thousands of dead human beings is never mentioned, and witnesses to this great crime are not called.
Jo Wilding, a young law graduate, is one such witness.   She was one of a group of human rights observers in Baghdad during the bombing.   She and the others lived with Iraqi families as the missiles and cluster bombs exploded around them.   Where possible, they would follow the explosions to scenes of civilian casualties and trace the victims to hospitals and mortuaries, interviewing the eyewitnesses and doctors.   She kept meticulous notes.
She saw children cut to pieces by shrapnel and screaming because there were no anaesthetics or painkillers.   She saw Fatima, a mother stained with the blood of her eight children.   She saw streets, mosques and farmhouses bombed by marauding aircraft.   "Nothing could explain them," she told me, "other than that it was a deliberate attack on civilians."
As these atrocities were carried out in our name, why are we not hearing such crucial evidence?   And why is Blair allowed to make yet more self-serving speeches, and none of them from the dock?
ESTIMATED NUCLEAR WARHEADS, STRATEGIC AND TACTICAL
Map showing declared, suspected and potential nuclear nations. The US is also said to have some 3,000 warheads in reserve, while Russia has about 11,000 in non-operational stockpiles. Israel declines to confirm it has nuclear weapons. North Korea — 1 test underground, October 2006. Iran is accused by the US of ambitions to build nuclear arms. The United states had drawn up a battle plan for the potential use of nuclear weapons in Iraq and the United States has been involved in planning potential nuclear use scenarios for Iran. The United States is now involved in a massive program to overhaul its nuclear arsenal. In fact they're working to replace every nuclear warhead and all of the existing delivery systems in the arsenal to ensure prompt precision global strike capabilities. Jackie Cabasso — Western States Legal Foundation
The United States has conducted 1,127 nuclear and thermonuclear tests — 217 in the atmosphere.
The Soviet Union/ Russia conducted 969 tests — 219 in the atmosphere.
France, 210 tests, 50 in the atmosphere.
The United Kingdom, 45 tests — 21 in the atmosphere.
China, 45 tests — 23 in the atmosphere.
India and Pakistan — 13 tests underground.
Israel — possible 1 test atmosphere South Africa 1979.
North Korea — 1 test underground, October 2006.
“The United states had drawn up a battle plan for the potential use of nuclear weapons in Iraq and the United States has been involved in planning potential nuclear use scenarios for Iran.”
“The United States is now involved in a massive program to overhaul its nuclear arsenal.   In fact they're working to replace every nuclear warhead and all of the existing delivery systems in the arsenal to ensure prompt precision global strike capabilities.”
Jackie Cabasso — Western States Legal Foundation
Western Elite militarism
Western Elite Terror States
Western Elite War Crimes
'Oh!   You don't believe the 9-11 official version,' they say.
'You mean where they want you to accept the buildings were not blown up from below.
'Plane fuel!   Substance never burns higher then a gas stove!   That it caused the inner core steel to melt!
'Steel melting!
'Concrete vaporizing!
' 'No!   I don't believe that conspiracy theory.
'Cheney!   Bush!   Rudy Giuliani!   HA!  HA!
'Tower 7 that never had a plane hit — just came tumbling down!
'You believe that, eh!
'Ever think it had to be blown up because the plane scheduled to fly into it was off getting shot down.
'Thermite in Tower 7's walls, you see — incriminating evidence — impossible to get out without people watching!
Had to be blown up!
'Next you'll be saying Obama is not a Wall Street Illuminati banker stooge?
'Take your pick:   The partner in a comedy team who feeds lines to the other comedians.
'Him who allows himself to be used.
'Oh!   I can't really blame you,   Television it turns minds to pulp.
'Turn off the television.   It's the only way.'
'Turn off the television?'
'Get rid of it really.   I mean what else is there to do!'
'Get rid of the television?'
'Don't forget all radio garbage is propaganda, even the songs.
'Then those five minute propaganda hits they send you every hour!
'The ones they refer to as News
'Get rid of all the propaganda from your brain, the only way to do it.'
'Stop being hooked on those Hollywood movies — even those that make you think they are making you think'
'All paid performers to make your brain dead.
'You turn the brainwashing off, you'll begin to become yourself.
'It really is the only way!'
'Oh!'
Kewe — TheWE.biz
 
       We are change      
            9/11 lies have sustained the ruling terrorism-threat paradigm          
       The “why” is obvious: To justify an unjust war to serve corporate interests and greed       
       9.11 Truth New York City      
      Decades long history of political disruption the US has been responsible for          
           9/11 is part of a long series of criminal, imperialist conquests          
           Another major highlight was surprise appearance of Cynthia McKinney       
 
       Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth      
            A solid convincing case which architects & engineers will readily see: that the 3 WTC high-rise buildings were destroyed by both classic and novel forms of controlled demolition          
       These buildings were professionally demolished with explosives       
  Protests around world every 11th of month
Danish scientist Niels Harrit on nano-thermite in the WTC dust. Niels Harrit, you and eight other researchers conclude in this article that it was nano-thermite that caused these buildings to collapse. We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples we have studied of the dust produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center. One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC Tower, two the next day, and a fourth about a week later. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic. The carbon content of the red material indicates that an organic substance is present. This would be expected for super-thermite formulations in order to produce high gas pressures upon ignition and thus make them explosive. Photo: agenda911.dk
Danish scientist Niels Harrit on nano-thermite in the WTC dust
ITALIAN SAYS 9-11 SOLVED
It’s common knowledge, he reveals
CIA — Mossad behind terror attacks
By the Staff of American Free Press
Former Italian President Francesco Cossiga, who revealed the existence of Operation Gladio, has told Italy’s oldest and most widely read newspaper that the 9-11 terrorist attacks were run by the CIA and Mossad, and that this was common knowledge among global intelligence agencies.
In what translates awkwardly into English, Cossiga told the newspaper Corriere della Sera:
“All the [intelligence services] of America and Europe… know well that the disastrous attack has been planned and realized from the Mossad, with the aid of the Zionist world in order to put under accusation the Arabic countries and in order to induce the western powers to take part … in Iraq [and] Afghanistan.”
Cossiga was elected president of the Italian Senate in July 1983 before winning a landslide election to become president of the country in 1985, and he remained until 1992.
Cossiga’s tendency to be outspoken upset the Italian political establishment, and he was forced to resign after revealing the existence of, and his part in setting up, Operation Gladio.
This was a rogue intelligence network under NATO auspices that carried out bombings across Europe in the 1960s, 1970s and ’80s.
Gladio’s specialty was to carry out what they termed 'false flag' operations — terror attacks that were blamed on their domestic and geopolitical opposition.
In March 2001, Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra stated, in sworn testimony:
“You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game.
The reason was quite simple: to force … the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.”
Cossiga first expressed his doubts about 9-11 in 2001, and is quoted by 9-11 researcher Webster Tarpley saying:
“The mastermind of the attack must have been a sophisticated mind, provided with ample means not only to recruit fanatic kamikazes, but also highly specialized personnel.
I add one thing: it could not be accomplished without infiltrations in the radar and flight security personnel.”
Coming from a widely respected former head of state, Cossiga’s assertion that the 9-11 attacks were an inside job and that this is common knowledge among global intelligence agencies is illuminating.
It is one more eye-opening confirmation that has not been mentioned by America’s propaganda machine in print or on TV.
Nevertheless, because of his experience and status in the world, Cossiga cannot be discounted as a crackpot.
Free to redistribute as long as credit given to American Free Press
We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples we have studied of the dust produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center. One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC Tower, two the next day, and a fourth about a week later. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic. The carbon content of the red material indicates that an organic substance is present. This would be expected for super-thermite formulations in order to produce high gas pressures upon ignition and thus make them explosive. Photo: Bentham-Open.org
Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe
Photo: Bentham-Open.org
Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe
We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples we have studied of the dust produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center.
One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC Tower, two the next day, and a fourth about a week later.
The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC).
The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic.
The carbon content of the red material indicates that an organic substance is present.
This would be expected for super-thermite formulations in order to produce high gas pressures upon ignition and thus make them explosive.
       Told for the first time — the story of Mossad's advance 'knowledge' about the 9-11 attack and how the US Army reported that Mossad "has capability to target US forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act."       
       Suppressed Details Of Criminal Insider Trading Lead Directly Into The Cia's Highest Ranks
In the hours following the World Trade Center attack, millions of American Jews were shocked and deeply hurt at accusations spreading around the world like wildfire that Israel had been behind the attack, and had even warned thousands of Jews working in the Twin Towers not to go to work that morning.       
       It is a fair question to ask if Israeli intelligence might have known in advance and, further, if Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency) might have had a hand in advancing the act to deflect criticism against Israeli actions in Palestine.       
       The secret story of Mossad and the World Trade Center attack      
       The Odigo Warning: Israeli employees get e-mail warnings of 9-11     
       SEC Secret Probe Of Stock Dealings Before 9/11    
       Truth Action LA Branch      
            We are in the midst of a mass awakening          
       9/11 is the foundational myth upon which the entire agenda has been triggered for our generation       
 
       Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice      
            High Velocity Bursts of Debris From Point-Like Sources in the WTC Towers           
       Why Did the World’s Most Advanced Electronics Warfare Plane Circle Over The White House on 9/11?        
Your life, your children's lives —
Will you live or die?
Decided by small group of elite.
Pure evil
It doesn't get any clearer than this
 
Published on Friday, March 2, 2007 by the Los Angeles Times
US to Develop New Hydrogen Bomb
by Ralph Vartabedian
The Energy Department will announce today a contract to develop the nation's first new hydrogen bomb in two decades, involving a collaboration between three national weapons laboratories, The Times has learned.
The new bomb will include design features from all three labs, though Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Bay Area appears to have taken the lead position in the project. The Los Alamos and Sandia labs in New Mexico will also be part of the project.
       Hiroshima, Nagasaki      
       — George Weller report      
Why are the West's elites trying to start a nuclear war?
Because you pay for it
BBC — Thursday, 6 September 2007
UK jets 'chase Russian bombers'
UK MoD image of Tupolev-95 Bear bomber An MoD photo shows RAF Typhoon shadowing a Russian Bear-H
Norway says Russia has increased military flights in the Arctic
The UK's Royal Air Force has launched fighter jets to intercept eight Russian military planes flying in airspace patrolled by Nato, UK officials say.
Four RAF F3 Tornado aircraft were scrambled in response to the Russian action, the UK's defence ministry said.
The Russian planes - said to be long-range bombers - had earlier been followed by Norwegian F16 jets.
Russia recently revived a Cold War-era practice of flying bombers on long-range patrols.
A Norwegian officer, Lt Col John Inge Oegland, told the BBC the Russian Tupolev Tu-95 Bear bombers flew in international airspace from the Barents Sea to the Atlantic, before turning back.
Two Norwegian F-16s shadowed them on Thursday morning and another two went up later, he said.
There have been several similar incidents in recent months, Lt-Col Oegland added.
"Norway is following the increased Russian activity in the far north with interest," he told the BBC News website.
He said the Russian flights were not causing alarm in Norway.   "Our systems are adequate," he said, when asked whether Norway was bolstering its security in the area.
Over time I was increasingly shocked by the speed and ease with which many intelligent and seemingly competent members of the CFR [ Council on Foreign Relations ] appeared to eagerly justify policies and actions that supported growing corruption.
The regularity with which many CFR members would protect insiders from accountability regarding another appalling fraud surprised even me.
Many of them seemed delighted with the advantages of being an insider while being entirely indifferent to the extraordinary cost to all citizens of having our lives, health and resources drained to increase insider wealth in a manner that violated the most basic principles of fiduciary obligation and respect for the law.
In short, the CFR was operating in a win-lose economic paradigm that centralized economic and political power.
I was trying to find a way for us to shift to a win-win economic paradigm that was — by its nature — decentralizing.
Catherine Austin Fitts — Dillon Reid and Co. Inc. And the Aristocracy of Stock Profits
 
The reader can appreciate why Wall Street would welcome someone as accommodating as Gorelick at Fannie Mae.
This was a period when the profits rolled in from engineering the most spectacular growth in mortgage debt in U.S. history.
As one real estate broker said, “They have turned our homes into ATM machines.”
Fannie Mae has been a leading player in centralizing control of the mortgage markets into Washington D.C. and Wall Street.
And that means as people were rounded up and shipped to prison as part of Operation Safe Home, Fannie was right behind to finance the gentrification of neighborhoods.
And that is before we ask questions about the extent to which the estimated annual financial flows of $500 billion–$1 trillion money laundering through the U.S. financial system or money missing from the US government are reinvested into Fannie Mae securities.
Catherine Austin Fitts — Dillon Reid and Co. Inc. And the Aristocracy of Stock Profits
James Forrestal
James Forrestal’s oil portrait always hung prominently in one of the private Dillon Read dining rooms for the eleven years that I worked at the firm. Forrestal, a highly regarded Dillon partner and President of the firm, had gone to Washington, D.C. in 1940 to lead the Navy during WWII and then played a critical role in creating the National Security Act of 1947. He then became Secretary of War (later termed Secretary of Defense) in September 1947 and served until March 28, 1949. Given the central banking-warfare investment model that rules our planet, it was appropriate that Dillon partners at various times lead both the Treasury Department and the Defense Department. Shortly after resigning from government, Forrestal died falling out of a window of the Bethesda Naval Hospital outside of Washington, D.C. on May 22, 1949. There is some controversy around the official explanation of his death — ruled a suicide. Some insist he had a nervous breakdown. Some say that he was opposed to the creation of the state of Israel. Others say that he argued for transparency and accountability in government, and against the provisions instituted at this time to create a secrete “black budget.” He lost and was pretty upset about it — and the loss was a violent one. Since the professional killers who operate inside the Washington beltway have numerous techniques to get perfectly sane people to kill themselves, I am not sure it makes a big difference. Approximately a month later, the CIA Act of 1949 was passed. The Act created the CIA and endowed it with the statutory authority that became one of the chief components of financing the “black” budget — the power to claw monies from other agencies for the benefit of secretly funding the intelligence communities and their corporate contractors. This was to turn out to be a devastating development for the forces of transparency, without which there can be no rule of law, free markets or democracy. Catherine Austin Fitts — Dillon Reid and Co. Inc. And the Aristocracy of Stock Profits Photo: Wikipedia     

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Forrestal as an administrative assistant on June 22, 1940, then nominated him as Undersecretary of the Navy six weeks later. In the latter post, Forrestal would prove to be very effective at mobilizing industrial production for the war effort.
He became Secretary of the Navy on May 19, 1944, following the death of his immediate supervisor Frank Knox from a heart attack. Forrestal then led the Navy through the closing year of the war and the demobilization that followed.   What might have been his greatest legacy as Navy Secretary was an attempt that came to nought.   He, along with Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Under Secretary of State Joseph Grew, in the early months of 1945, strongly advocated a softer policy toward Japan that would permit a negotiated face-saving surrender.   His primary concern was "the menace of Russian Communism and its attraction for decimated, destabilized societies in Europe and Asia", and, therefore, keeping the Soviet Union out of the war with Japan.   Had his advice been followed, Japan might well have surrendered before August 1945, precluding the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.   So strongly did he feel about this matter that he cultivated negotiation attempts that bordered closely on insubordination toward the President.
Forrestal opposed the unification of the services, but even so helped develop the National Security Act of 1947 that created the National Military Establishment (the Department of Defense was not created as such until August 1949), and with the former Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson retiring to private life, Forrestal was the next choice.
His 18 months at Defense came at an exceptionally difficult time for the U.S. military establishment:   Communist governments came to power in Czechoslovakia and China; West Berlin was blockaded, necessitating the Berlin Airlift to keep it going; the war between the Arab states and Israel after the establishment of Israel in Palestine; and negotiations were going on for the formation of NATO.   His reign was also hampered by intense interservice rivalries.
In addition, President Harry Truman constrained military budgets billions of dollars below what the services were requesting, putting Forrestal in the middle of the tug-of-war.   Forrestal was also becoming more and more worried about the Soviet threat.   Internationally, the takeover by the Communists of Eastern Europe, their threats to the governments of Greece, Italy, and France, their impending takeover of China, and the invasion of South Korea by North Korea would demonstrate the legitimacy of his concerns on the international front as well.
Photo and description: Wikipedia
James Forrestal’s oil portrait always hung prominently in one of the private Dillon Read dining rooms for the eleven years that I worked at the firm. Forrestal, a highly regarded Dillon partner and President of the firm, had gone to Washington, D.C. in 1940 to lead the Navy during WWII and then played a critical role in creating the National Security Act of 1947.
He then became Secretary of War (later termed Secretary of Defense) in September 1947 and served until March 28, 1949.
Given the central banking-warfare investment model that rules our planet, it was appropriate that Dillon partners at various times lead both the Treasury Department and the Defense Department.
Shortly after resigning from government, Forrestal died falling out of a window of the Bethesda Naval Hospital outside of Washington, D.C. on May 22, 1949.
There is some controversy around the official explanation of his death — ruled a suicide.
Some insist he had a nervous breakdown. Some say that he was opposed to the creation of the state of Israel.
Others say that he argued for transparency and accountability in government, and against the provisions instituted at this time to create a secrete “black budget.”
He lost and was pretty upset about it — and the loss was a violent one.
Since the professional killers who operate inside the Washington beltway have numerous techniques to get perfectly sane people to kill themselves, I am not sure it makes a big difference.
Approximately a month later, the CIA Act of 1949 was passed.
The Act created the CIA and endowed it with the statutory authority that became one of the chief components of financing the “black” budget — the power to claw monies from other agencies for the benefit of secretly funding the intelligence communities and their corporate contractors.
This was to turn out to be a devastating development for the forces of transparency, without which there can be no rule of law, free markets or democracy.
Catherine Austin Fitts — Dillon Reid and Co. Inc. And the Aristocracy of Stock Profits
       Protecting the brand with dirty tricks — Enforcement Terrorism      
       The profitable liquidation of every place — Coutts, bank for British Queen and royals      
       Catherine Austin Fitts — Dillon Reid and Co. Inc. And the Aristocracy of Stock Profits      
What Briody does not mention is allegations regarding Brown & Root's involvement in narcotics trafficking. Former LAPD narcotics investigator Mike Ruppert once described his break up with fiance Teddy — an agent dealing narcotics and weapons for the CIA while working with Brown & Root, as follows:
“Arriving in New Orleans in early July, 1977 I found her living in an apartment across the river in Gretna. Equipped with scrambler phones, night vision devices and working from sealed communiqués delivered by naval and air force personnel from nearby Belle Chasse Naval Air Station, Teddy was involved in something truly ugly.
She was arranging for large quantities of weapons to be loaded onto ships leaving for Iran.
At the same time she was working with Mafia associates of New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello to coordinate the movement of service boats that were bringing large quantities of heroin into the city.
The boats arrived at Marcello controlled docks, unmolested by even the New Orleans police she introduced me to, along with divers, military men, former Green Berets and CIA personnel.
“The service boats were retrieving the heroin from oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, oil rigs in international waters, oil rigs built and serviced by Brown and Root.
The guns that Teddy monitored, apparently Vietnam era surplus AK 47s and M16s, were being loaded onto ships also owned or leased by Brown and Root.
And more than once during the eight days I spent in New Orleans I met and ate at restaurants with Brown and Root employees who were boarding those ships and leaving for Iran within days.
Once, while leaving a bar and apparently having asked the wrong question, I was shot at in an attempt to scare me off.”
Source: "Halliburton’s Brown and Root is One of the Major Components of the Bush-Cheney Drug Empire" by Michael Ruppert, From the Wilderness
Catherine Austin Fitts — Dillon Reid and Co. Inc. And the Aristocracy of Stock Profits
       The CIA led its contra army to spend the entire decade terrorizing the Nicaraguan people and their Sandinista government, happily allowing the contras to flood Los Angeles and other North American cities with cocaine to fund their efforts
       San Jose Mercury News executive editor Jerry Ceppos’ cowardly retreat from Dark Alliance included deleting the website, and destroying thousands of undistributed CDROM versions of the site
Gary Webb identifies the alliance at the root of his story as "the union of a U.S-backed army attempting to overthrow a revolutionary socialist government and the Uzi-toting 'gangstas' of Compton and South-Central Los Angeles."
       References to cocaine paste in Oliver North's notebooks
       Only one kind of paste, that's cocaine paste
       Dark Alliance — The Story Behind the Crack Explosion      
       The "Good Guys" Who Can Do No Wrong       
       Profoundest suspicions of white malfeasance were true       
The Clinton Administration took the groundwork laid by Nixon, Reagan and Bush and embraced and blossomed the expansion and promotion of federal support for police, enforcement and the War on Drugs with a passion that was hard to understand unless and until you realized that the American financial system was deeply dependent on attracting an estimated $500 billion-$1 trillion of annual money laundering.
Globalizing corporations and deepening deficits and housing bubbles required attracting vast amounts of capital.
Attracting capital also required making the world safe for the reinvestment of the profits of organized crime and the war machine.
Without growing organized crime and military activities through government budgets and contracts, the economy would stop centralizing.
The Clinton Administration was to govern a doubling of the federal prison population.
Catherine Austin Fitts — Dillon Reid and Co. Inc. And the Aristocracy of Stock Profits
If you never see another movie, better watch this: the old original version still allowed on Google video
For Google video version — click here — it will state this version is old!
This version is not censored — it is infinitely better then the newer censored version
To download this version and keep
http://keepvid.com
copy and paste
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=5547481422995115331
P.S. The new Zeitgeist movie is loaded with political rhetoric
It cannot be more opposite of the sense of Zeitgeist — a German word meaning 'Of the time'
AND don't forget this:
Pandora's Black Box Chapter Two — click here
Pilots for 911 truth — click here
9/11
By all accounts, the unprecedented events of September 11th, 2001 changed the way our country functions, and in turn, the world.
It is therefore critical that conscientious Americans, as well as people around the globe, understand these events in detail.
Unfortunately the official reports, including The 9/11 Commission Report and the NIST WTC Report, written by those working under the direction of the Bush Administration, have been proven to be elaborate cover-ups.
 Film: 9/11 Revisited
September 11th Revisited is perhaps the most riveting film ever made about the destruction of the World Trade Center.
This is a powerful documentary which features eyewitness accounts and archived news footage that was shot on September 11, 2001 but never replayed on television.
Featuring interviews with eyewitnesses & firefighters, along with expert analysis by Professor Steven E. Jones, Professor David Ray Griffin, MIT Engineer Jeffrey King, and Professor James H. Fetzer.
This film provides stunning evidence that explosives were used in the complete demolition of the WTC Twin Towers and WTC Building 7.
For Film: 9/11 Revisited
— Click Here
Film: 9/11 Press for Truth
An excellent documentary about the families of the victims of 9/11 and their fight to uncover and expose the truth about what happened that day.
For Film: 9/11 Press for Truth
— Click Here
Film: 9/11 Mysteries
90 minutes of pure demolition evidence and analysis, laced with staggering witness testimonials.
Moving from “the myth” through “the analysis” and into “the players,” careful deconstruction of the official story set right alongside clean, clear science.
The 9/11 picture is not one of politics or nationalism or loyalty, but one of strict and simple physics.   How do you get a 10-second 110-story pancake collapse?
Every missile has a home. Photo: Alaska Image Library
Every missile has a home
(No Mortgages to Worry About)
Image: Natasha Mayers
It's kind of a fun game
You see the aim of those inner forces who guide the Elite —
For them the real agenda is depopulation
To kill off you
your children
your grandchildren
It is to have fun watching our stupidity as we allow the destruction of our planet
     — but most haven't figured this out yet!
If we stop them with the nuclear and biological weapons
then it's the 400+ MPH, KPH wind
the increase in UVB, UVC, UVA rays due to loss of stratospheric ozone.
It's the climate!
It's the reduction and elimination of food coming from all levels of cunning
World Elite — tools and servants of Lucifer
The fall of Lucifer, Gustave Doré's illustration for Paradise Lost by John Milton. Photo: wikipedia.org/
The fall of Lucifer
Gustave Doré's illustration for Paradise Lost by John Milton
       The Dark Side Initiates — Click here      
       Dark path initiates depend on the denial      
       The five-percent manipulator class is composed of those on the dark path      
       Agent Orange Dioxin — Vietnam      
       Cleft palate, Canoe footed, Clawed fingers continue in births    
       I didn't know what it was then, but it was white    
       UVC in the 10 to 290 nanometer band      
       UVB, 290 to 320 nanometers    
       UVA, 320 to 400 nanometers    
       Soot's effect on ice melt and glaciers      
       Washington State's Glaciers are Melting    
       Remnants of knowledge would be retained with those on higher ground.   A few people here, a few there.      
       Translations of discussions with The WE      
Unspeakable grief and horror
ÇáäÊÇÆÌ ÇáÃæáíÉ ááÍá ÇáÃãíÑßí ÇáÍÐÑ ááãÞÇæãÉ ÇáÚÑÇÞíÉ Ýí ÇáÝáæÌÉ (ÇáÌÒíÑÉ)
                        ...and the circus of deception killing continues...
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!
To say hello:     hello[the at marker]Kewe.info
For Kewe's spiritual and metaphysical pages — click here
        Les Roberts joins us now from Syracuse, New York        
        — He is one of the main researchers of the 650,000 Iraq deaths study.         

        He was with Johns Hopkins when he co-authored the study        
        Video click here to watch at www.DemocracyNow.org       
       Kill ratio — World War Soldier did not kill — but Vietnam, and Iraq soldiers do.       
Iraq — Death — Injury and Torture
— Military industrial complex
— Democracy in Thrall
       Ozone layer hits new depletion record as of October 2006     
            —  Why did you cut down the trees Grandma?         
      Global warming point of no return       
       Guantanamo Hunger Strikers being tortured         
      US Federal Piechart Budget Anaylsis     
      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      
             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 - Terror, Torture, Poppy cultivation, Opium       
       He was a young boy       
       and he spent three days in the detainee facilities       
      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...         
       Suicide Bombing  Blair, Bush      

       Suicide Bombing is response to foreign occupation      

       Will stop once troops withdraw      
       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        
        2010 hottest first 6 months ever recorded         
        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        

 
For archive purposes, this article is being stored on TheWE.biz website.
The purpose is to advance understandings of environmental, political,
human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues.
        Globalization          Enviro News   
                Abrupt climate event   
    World's Garden              War photos   
   ‘War Circus’   

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