Iraq

The Legacy of the Iraq War: Over 100,000 Dead, 20,000 Unidentified

By Andy WorthingtonBombing Iraq

As combat operations officially end in Iraq, nearly seven and a half years after the Bush administration’s illegal invasion, it is difficult to know how to summarize succinctly the tragic cost of the enterprise.
 
I retain nothing but disdain — and a desire for accountability — for those who initiated this criminal, and criminally ill-conceived attempt at nation-building — primarily, President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

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The Peace Laureate’s Prayer: War Without End, Amen

By Chris Floyd

The Peace Laureate and his apologists – along with all the well-wadded neoconmen and their strange bedfellows, the liberal interventionists – may like to proclaim that the Iraq War is over (and we won!), but those actually fighting the war know that – as Cab Calloway liked to say of the stories you’re liable to read in the Bible – it ain’t necessarily so.

From the Army Times: Combat brigades in Iraq under different name. As the final convoy of the Army’s 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, based at Fort Lewis, Wash., entered Kuwait early Thursday, a different Stryker brigade remained in Iraq.

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Memories of “Collateral Murder” - by Someone who was There

Ethan McCord was a member of the military unit in "Collateral Murder" - the Wikileaks video showing 12 Iraqis being killed from a US helicopter. He rescued the two children severely wounded in the attack and is now speaking out to corroborate the Collateral Murder video. No one has been charged in connection with these killings. However, 22 yr. old Pfc. Bradley Manning has been held incommunicado on military bases for several months now, suspected of leaking this incriminating video to Wikileaks, without which we would never know about this crime. See below for the speech that Ethan gave at the United National Peace Conference, which took place in Albany, NY the weekend of July 23-25, 2010.

The smell was unlike anything I’ve smelled before, a mixture of feces, urine, blood, smoke, and something else indescribable. 

That day started out much like many days in Iraq. We were woken up about 230 am to prepare for a mission one of many that seemed to be pointless. Our Battalion commander called them “Ranger dominance” But many of the soldiers such as myself dubbed them “Ranger dumbass” These missions consisted 2 company’s walking through new Baghdad unprotected from snipers and IEDs. We dreaded them and despised our battalion commander because of them.

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Echoes of Mengele: Medical Experiments, Torture and Continuity in the American Gulag

 by Chris Floyd   


This is the language of power – unfiltered, unadorned, dispassionate, professional – discussing how best to inflict tortures on helpless captives without causing "long-term" damage that might be visible later:
“But as we understand the experience involving the combination of various techniques, the OMS medical and psychological personnel have not observed any such increase in susceptibility. Other than the waterboard, the specific techniques under consideration in this memorandum— including sleep deprivation—have been applied to more than 25 detainees.… No apparent increase in susceptibility to severe pain has been observed either when techniques are used sequentially or when they are used simultaneously—for example, when an insult slap is simultaneously combined with water dousing or a kneeling stress position, or when wall standing is simultaneously combined with an abdominal slap and water dousing.

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Shoot the Messenger: U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe

From Al Jazeera

A US soldier serving in Iraq has been arrested for allegedly leaking a classified combat video to a whistleblower website, Wikileaks, last year.
 
The video footage from a helicopter cockpit shows a deadly 2007 aerial strike in the Iraqi capital that killed 12 civilians including two journalists from the Reuters news agency.

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A Sordid Story: Obama's Afghan Torture Center and the American Psychological Association

 By Stephen Soldz 

 
A recent pair of articles by Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic has shed new light upon activities in the secret so-called “black jail” on the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
 
Among other aspects, these new revelations suggest that psychologists may be playing a major role inside the facility, raising questions about the reasons for American Psychological Association (APA) lobbying activities in support of the agency that Ambinder reports is running the detention center.

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Ahmed Abu Ali: – Tortured, Sentenced to Supermax Prison - Guilty of Being Muslim in America

By Stephen Lendman

 
Writing on May 12 in Alternet.org, Mariam Abu Ali headlined, "My Brother Faces a Lifetime of Solitary Confinement on a Spurious Terror Conviction," saying:
 
He "spent the past five years in solitary confinement, under 23-hour lockdown, in a 7 x 12 cell," and overall has been treated horrifically "in a dungeon, over 20 meters beneath the ground."
 
An April article by this writer explained what they're like. Material from it is repeated below.

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The Poetry of Death: Patterns of State Terror

By Chris Floyd

The found poetry of state terror continues its strange mutilations of the English language. The bizarre verbal heavings of Donald Rumsfeld, for example, are rightly celebrated as choice examples of the genre.
 
And noted English playwright David Hare once fashioned a whole play built largely on the "thought-tormented music" wrought from verbatim transcripts of the principal authors of the war crime in Iraq.

In this regard, as in almost every aspect of the Terror War, "continuity" has been the hallmark of the Obama Administration. But we would do the progressive, forward-looking president a grave disservice if we were to imply that this dynamic, historic figure has confined himself to mere continuity.
 

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20 Killed in US Drone Attack in Pakistan

 This article is taken from the site PressTV

 
At least twenty people have been killed in the latest US missile strike in tribal regions in northwestern Pakistan, local security officials confirm. 

According to two Pakistani intelligence officials on Sunday, a US drone fired two missiles that hit the house of local tribesman Awal Gul in Enzer Kasa village of the Datta Khel area in North Waziristan, a tribal region near the Afghan border. 

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War Propaganda from Afghanistan

By Glenn Greenwald

 
The New York Times yesterday excitedly declared that the imminent Battle of Kandahar "has become the make-or-break offensive of the eight-and-half-year [Afghanistan] war" and is "the pivotal test of President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy."  As Atrios suggests, there never is any such thing as "make-or-break" because we never leave no matter how completely our war and occupation efforts fail. 
 
That's what led to the countless Friedman Units of the Iraq War:  the endless proclamations that The Next Six Months will be Decisive, only to be repeated at the end of the six-month period of failure as though the prior one never happened.

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World Can't Wait mobilizes people living in the United States to stand up and stop war on the world, repression and torture carried out by the US government. We take action, regardless of which political party holds power, to expose the crimes of our government, from war crimes to systematic mass incarceration, and to put humanity and the planet first.