(GlobalResearch) – Last week, President Obama ceremoniously announced that U.S. combat operations had ended in Iraq. As Democrats face an uphill battle in the upcoming midterm elections, Obama felt he had to make good on his campaign promise to move the fighting from Iraq to Afghanistan. But while he has escalated the killing in Afghanistan, it’s business as usual in Iraq. Read the rest of this entry »

(Fox) – April 12, 2010 – Judge Napolitano Read the rest of this entry »

(Globe&Mail) – Obama’s new nuclear strategy maintains first-strike option

While pledging to ‘reduce the role of nuclear weapons,’ plan also includes loopholes to keep Iran and North Korea on any potential target list Read More Here

(WashingtonPost) – Bomb blasts kill at least 35, wound scores in Shiite areas of Baghdad

A series of at least seven bombings ripped through mostly poor Shiite Muslim neighborhoods in the Iraqi capital Tuesday, killing at least 35 people and wounding at least 140, security officials said. Read More Here

(ArabNews) – Iran’s Calls For N-free Mideast Should Be Backed

From April 17-18, Iran intends to host a nuclear disarmament summit just four days after Washington concludes a nuclear security summit to which Tehran was not invited. Under the banner “Nuclear energy for everyone, nuclear arms for no one”, Iran calls for a nuclear-free Middle East and an end to nuclear proliferation globally. Read More Here

(RickRozoff) – War In Afghanistan Evokes Second World War Parallels

With the Pentagon and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization planning the largest military campaign of the Afghan war this summer in the south, Kandahar province, a complementary offensive in the north, Kunduz province, and increased troop strength of 150,000 in preparation for the assaults, a war that will enter its tenth calendar year this October 7 is reaching the apex of its intensity. Read More Here

(SteveWatson) – Video: CNN Touts Civilian Service Corps As Way Of Shedding Student Debt

CNN has some advice for any former students now saddled with excess debt – carry out a decade of social work or join the ranks of the government’s civilian service corps. Read More Here

(Salon) – Iraq slaughter not an aberration – Glenn Greenwald – Read More Here

(PaulWatson) – Journalist Groups Demand Investigation of Baghdad Massacre

Three prominent journalist organizations have called for a new investigation into the shocking footage released by Wikileaks that shows U.S. Apache helicopters massacring Reuters journalists and people who attempted to rescue them while laughing about it during an assault on a Baghdad square in 2007. Read More Here

(OnlineJournal) – Killing Baghdad civilians and Reuters journos from the air!

It boggles the mind to watch the short YouTube videos of Wikileaks’ leaked video. To hear the clipped voices of the American helicopter pilots honing in on a group of civilians, including a Reuters photographer and his driver in a July 2007 attack in Baghdad, then killing them, mistaking the photographer’s camera for an AK-47. Read More Here

(RawStory) – White House won’t deny report saying it approved killing of American without trial

The White House won’t deny reports claiming that it authorized the killing of an American citizen who is purportedly involved in planning al Qaeda attacks and is said to be hiding out in Yemen. Read More Here

Video: Violence in Video Games and the Baghdad Massacre Read the rest of this entry »

(SteveWatson) – The sickening video released today of U.S. troops slaughtering innocent civilians, including two Reuters reporters in Baghdad in July 2007, clearly indicates why the Pentagon was intent on destroying Wikileaks, the whistleblower website that it now has little chance of putting out of business. Read the rest of this entry »

(PaulWatson) – Bloodthirsty neo-cons who would defend barbecuing Arab babies on the White House lawn if they were told it was part of the “war on terror” are disgracefully scrambling to defend a shocking video released by Wikileaks which shows U.S. Apache helicopters massacring Iraqi journalists and children in Baghdad while laughing about it. Read the rest of this entry »

(KurtNimmo) – The Baghdad snuff video released by WikiLeaks has yet to receive much corporate media play. MSNBC, however, covered the video. In a discussion of the video, Brett McGurk of the Council on Foreign Relations and an NSC member for Bush and Obama, defended the mass murder episode. McGurk said the soldiers fired on journalists because they thought they saw an RPG launcher. Read the rest of this entry »

Wikileaks has obtained and decrypted this previously unreleased video footage from a US Apache helicopter in 2007. It shows Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, driver Saeed Chmagh, and several others as the Apache shoots and kills them in a public square in Eastern Baghdad. They are apparently assumed to be insurgents. After the initial shooting, an unarmed group of adults and children in a minivan arrives on the scene and attempts to transport the wounded. They are fired upon as well. The official statement on this incident initially listed all adults as insurgents and claimed the US military did not know how the deaths ocurred. Wikileaks released this video with transcripts and a package of supporting documents on April 5th 2010 on http://collateralmurder.com -

Update #3. Iraqi journalists want probe of taped US shooting. (click here)

Update #2.   AP Military Source confirms video authenticity. (click here)

Update #1. Unedited long version of video below.

Read the rest of this entry »

(APNews) – Iraq has ordered hundreds of private security guards linked to Blackwater Worldwide to leave the country within seven days or face possible arrest on visa violations, the interior minister said Wednesday. Read the rest of this entry »

(Uruknet) – Forget about oil, occupation, terrorism or even Al Qaeda. The real hazard for Iraqis these days is cancer. Cancer is spreading like wildfire in Iraq. Thousands of infants are being born with deformities. Doctors say they are struggling to cope with the rise of cancer and birth defects, especially in cities subjected to heavy American and British bombardment. Read the rest of this entry »

Excuse the gloom in the holiday season, but I feel like we’re all locked inside a malign version of the movie Groundhog Day. You remember, the one in which the characters are forced to relive the same 24 hours endlessly.  Put more personally, TomDispatch started in November 2001 as an email to friends in response to the first moments of our latest Afghan War.  More than eight years later… well, you know the story. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since the fall of Baghdad, the volatility of virtually the entire Middle East has been ‘off the charts’. Principally, this development had to do with the ridiculous, grand-sounding imperial project of heralding in a watershed of democracy through the use of shocking and awful means. Read the rest of this entry »

(Truthout) – To public fury, the country is handing over control of its oilfields to foreign companies. Read the rest of this entry »

The federal Appeals Court decision to toss a lawsuit claiming contractors tortured detainees in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison is what you’d expect from a tyranny. Read the rest of this entry »

(RawStory) – The specter of private contractors carrying out assassinations on behalf of the US government has been raised in a New York Times article that says the CIA hired contractors from security firm Blackwater to help carry out its recently-revealed hit squad program. Read the rest of this entry »

I kid you not. This is the reasoning used by the FBI. The cops need automatic weapons to respond if the city falls victim to a Mumbai-like terror attack. It’s more likely Boston will get hit by a hurricane, but you don’t see the government building levees and boarding up windows. A terror attack launched against Boston figures pretty low on the probability chart. Read the rest of this entry »

Tent cities springing up all over America are filling with the homeless unemployed from the worst economy since the 1930s. While Americans live in tents, the Obama government has embarked on a $1 billion crash program to build a mega-embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, to rival the one the Bush government built in Baghdad, Iraq. Read the rest of this entry »

(Truthout) – Now-frequent dust storms are just one sign of the man-made damage that has taken the country from Middle East breadbasket to dust bowl, they say. Read the rest of this entry »

The Iraqi government has moved to sharply restrict the movement and activities of U.S. forces in a new reading of a six-month-old U.S.-Iraqi security agreement that has startled American commanders and raised concerns about the safety of their troops. Read the rest of this entry »

Fireworks lit up the Baghdad sky on the evening of June 30th, signaling the advent of “National Sovereignty Day.” Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki declared the new holiday to commemorate the withdrawal of American combat troops from the Iraqi capital and all other major urban centers, although thousands of “advisers” would remain in the cities, embedded with Iraqi forces. Read the rest of this entry »

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
- George Orwell
On July 4 in Baghdad, Vice President Joe Biden, who campaigned with Barack Obama on a platform of ending the occupation of Iraq, found himself in one of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s lavish buildings, the Al-Faw Palace. Read the rest of this entry »

The corporate media is getting all giddy and affording blanket coverage to the story of Iraqis who are “regaining their sovereignty” as U.S. troops are pulled out from Iraqi cities. This is of course lurid and baseless propaganda – hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops will remain in Iraq stationed at the dozens of military bases that have been built across the country. Read the rest of this entry »

The corporate media is getting all giddy and affording blanket coverage to the story of Iraqis who are “regaining their sovereignty” as U.S. troops are pulled out from Iraqi cities. This is of course lurid and baseless propaganda – hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops will remain in Iraq stationed at the dozens of military bases that have been built across the country. Read the rest of this entry »

The Central Intelligence Agency crucified a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, according to a report published in The New Yorker magazine. Read the rest of this entry »

Baghdad – The Iraqi government on Tuesday declared a public holiday to mark next week’s withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Baghdad and other cities. Read the rest of this entry »

Critics said the war was all about the nation’s lucrative fuel industry. Are they now being proved right? Patrick Cockburn reports from Baghdad Read the rest of this entry »

Critics said the war was all about the nation’s lucrative fuel industry. Are they now being proved right? Patrick Cockburn reports from Baghdad Read the rest of this entry »

John Bolton is a man obsessed with war in the middle east and, in particular, with Iran. Indeed, it seems that promoting a war with Iran has become his full time job. Read the rest of this entry »

The commander of Fort Campbell army base in Kentucky has ordered a three-day suspension of regular duties to focus on a spike in suicides among his troops amid concern over a wider trend across the armed services. Read the rest of this entry »

The theft of public money by members of parliament, including government ministers, has given Britons a rare glimpse inside the tent of power and privilege. It is rare because not one political reporter or commentator, those who fill tombstones of column inches and dominate broadcast journalism, revealed a shred of this scandal. It was left to a public relations man to sell the “leak”. Why? Read the rest of this entry »

Phil Aliff, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, draws on his own experience with the military’s inadequate mental health care system to make sense of the tragic shooting of five U.S. soldiers in Iraq by an Army sergeant being treated for symptoms of PTSD. Read the rest of this entry »

Brzezinski was right, of course. Obama was the perfect choice for president. Not because of his experience. He had none. He was a two year senator with a resume’ small enough to fit on the back of a matchbox. Still Obama had what Brzezinski and Co. were looking for, symbolism; the kind of symbolism that connected him to people around the world and made them feel like one of their own had finally clawed their way to the top. Read the rest of this entry »

Brzezinski was right, of course. Obama was the perfect choice for president. Not because of his experience. He had none. He was a two year senator with a resume’ small enough to fit on the back of a matchbox. Still Obama had what Brzezinski and Co. were looking for, symbolism; the kind of symbolism that connected him to people around the world and made them feel like one of their own had finally clawed their way to the top. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week found Iraq swimming in blood once again. Attacks last Thursday brought the worst violence Iraq has seen in over a year, with at least 96 Iraqis killed and 157 wounded in two massive suicide bombings. Over 35 bombings have rocked Baghdad this month alone. There appears to be no end in sight for the escalating violence. For an Obama administration that plans to keep at least 50,000 US troops in Iraq indefinitely, look no further for a justification in doing so. Read the rest of this entry »

With Iraq in ruins, Obama sends a politically connected firm, along with reps from AT&T, Google, and Twitter to build ‘smart power’ in Baghdad. Read the rest of this entry »

With Iraq in ruins, Obama sends a politically connected firm, along with reps from AT&T, Google, and Twitter to build ‘smart power’ in Baghdad. Read the rest of this entry »

Pakistan could collapse within months, one of the more influential counter-insurgency voices in Washington says. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Friends,
I pride myself in being a scientist and a researcher. I built my academic career on theories and numbers. As a teacher, I teach my students that everything is based in science – everything has reason. For this reason, I am always frustrated with myself when I find I am overwhelmed with feelings on specific topics. Read the rest of this entry »

Dick Cheney: “I guess my general sense of where we are with respect to Iraq and at the end of now, what, nearly six years, is that we’ve accomplished nearly everything we set out to do….” Read the rest of this entry »

Dick Cheney: “I guess my general sense of where we are with respect to Iraq and at the end of now, what, nearly six years, is that we’ve accomplished nearly everything we set out to do….” Read the rest of this entry »

Recent media reports on the mounting evidence of wholesale corruption in US reconstruction efforts in Iraq are symptomatic of the criminal nature of Washington’s war and occupation from their inception nearly six years ago. These crimes are continuing under the Obama administration, with no end in sight. Read the rest of this entry »

In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US -directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff’s notorious Ponzi scheme. Read the rest of this entry »

In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US -directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff’s notorious Ponzi scheme. Read the rest of this entry »

The Iraqi government has informed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad that it will not issue a new operating license to Blackwater Worldwide, the embassy’s primary security company, which has come under scrutiny for allegedly using excessive force while protecting American diplomats, Iraqi and U.S. officials said Wednesday. Read the rest of this entry »

December 11, 2008 – On November 27 the Iraqi parliament voted by a large majority in favor of a security agreement with the US under which the 150,000 American troops in Iraq will withdraw from cities, towns and villages by June 30, 2009 and from all of Iraq by December 31, 2011. The Iraqi government will take over military responsibility for the Green Zone in Baghdad, the heart of American power in Iraq, in a few weeks time. Private security companies will lose their legal immunity. US military operations and the arrest of Iraqis will only be carried out with Iraqi consent. There will be no US military bases left behind when the last US troops leave in three years time and the US military is banned in the interim from carrying out attacks on other countries from Iraq. Read the rest of this entry »

December 11, 2008 – On November 27 the Iraqi parliament voted by a large majority in favor of a security agreement with the US under which the 150,000 American troops in Iraq will withdraw from cities, towns and villages by June 30, 2009 and from all of Iraq by December 31, 2011. The Iraqi government will take over military responsibility for the Green Zone in Baghdad, the heart of American power in Iraq, in a few weeks time. Private security companies will lose their legal immunity. US military operations and the arrest of Iraqis will only be carried out with Iraqi consent. There will be no US military bases left behind when the last US troops leave in three years time and the US military is banned in the interim from carrying out attacks on other countries from Iraq. Read the rest of this entry »