BUSH STILL CONFLATING 9-11 AND IRAQ

"... in a major speech at the Naval War College that referred to al Qaida at least 27 times... Bush ... called al Qaida "the main enemy" in Iraq, an assertion rejected by his administration's senior intelligence analysts... Bush called al Qaida in Iraq... the same group that had carried out the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington."

"... U.S. military and intelligence officials, however, say that Iraqis with ties to al Qaida are only a small fraction of the threat to American troops. The group known as al Qaida in Iraq didn't exist before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, didn't pledge its loyalty to al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden until October 2004 and isn't controlled by bin Laden or his top aides..."

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/17471.html

SURGE METRICS AVAILABLE NOW

"... Americans are... waiting for... General David Petraeus, to “report” to Congress in September on the “progress” of the President’s surge strategy. But there really is no reason to wait for September. An interim report — “Iraq by the numbers” — can be prepared now... (and) early version of the “September Report.”
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/28/2158/

AMERICA OWES THE IRAQIS

"... we owe the Iraqis whose lives we have blighted quite a lot. We should repay that debt much as we... repaid our debt to the people of South Vietnam after 1975: by offering them sanctuary. In the decade after the fall of Saigon, some half-million Vietnamese refugees settled in the United States. Here, they found what they were unable to find in their own country: safety, liberty, and the opportunity for a decent life... The least we can do for Iraqis today is to extend a similar invitation."

"... the Bush administration has described US strategy in Iraq this way: As they stand up, we will stand down. At present, a more apt formulation is this one: As we depart, they can come along. To Iraqis seeking to escape the brutality and chaos that we have helped create, the "golden door" into the New World should open. Call it Operation Iraqi Freedom II."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0627/p09s02-coop.htm

U.S. IRAQ WAR WOUNDED

"More than 3,500 Americans have died in Iraq, but tens of thousands more are coming home, some tragically wounded... More than 800 of them have lost an arm, a leg, fingers or toes. More than 100 are blind. Dozens need tubes and machines to keep them alive. Hundreds are disfigured by burns, and thousands have brain injuries and damaged minds. These are America’s war wounded, a toll that has received less attention than the 3,500 troops killed in Iraq. Depending on how you count them, they number between 35,000 and 53,000... Harvard University... estimates that the lifetime health-care tab for these troops will be $250 billion to $650 billion..."
http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WSJ%2FMGArticle%2FWSJ_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1173351760178&path=!nationworld&s=1037645509161

U.S. KILLS LOCAL IRAQI GUARDSMEN AS "AL QAEDA"

US account
"... Coalition Forces... attack helicopters, armed with missiles, engaged and killed 17 al-Qaeda gunmen and destroyed the vehicle they were using."

Iraqi version
"... before the guards could even get to their own car, they were hit by a rocket strike by American helicopters which suddenly appeared overhead.... villagers... found 11 of the village guards dead, some of their bodies cut into small pieces by the munitions used... They are incensed that the village guards should be described as "al-Qaeda gunmen".

"... How many other coalition reports of successes against "al-Qaeda fighters" are based on similar mistakes, especially when powerful remote weaponry is used?... (and) where only the official military version of events is available."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6239896.stm

2004 FALLUJAH BATTLE WAS NOW AGAINST "AL QAEDA"

:... Gen. Odierno... (now says) that the 2004 battle of Falluja was aimed at capturing "top Qaeda leaders in the city." But (the New York Times) back in 2004, published a lengthy and detailed article about the Falluja situation and never once mentioned or even alluded to "Al Qaeda," writing only about the Iraqi Sunni insurgents in that city who were hostile to our occupation. The propagandistic transformation of "insurgents" into "Al Qaeda," then, applies not only to our current predicament but also to past battles as well, as a tool of rank revisionism (hence, it is now officially "The Glorious 2004 Battle against Al-Qaeda in Falluja").
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/06/23/al_qaeda/index.html?source=newsletter






http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/06/23/al_qaeda/index.html?source=newsletter

ADMINISTRATION SAYS ALL FIGHTERS IN IRAQ NOW "AL QAEDA"

"... the Bush administration, and specifically its military commanders, decided to begin using the term "Al Qaeda" to designate "anyone and everyeone we fight against or kill in Iraq"... All of a sudden, every time one of the top military commanders describes our latest operations or quantifies how many we killed, the enemy is referred to, almost exclusively now, as "Al Qaeda"... the war in Iraq is now indistinguishable from the initial stage of the war in Afghanistan -- that we are there fighting against the people who hijacked those planes and flew them into our buildings: "Al Qaeda"... what we are doing in Iraq is going after and killing members of the group which flew the planes into our buildings. Who could possibly be against that?..."
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/06/23/al_qaeda/index.html?source=newsletter

VETS WHO PROTEST IRAQ WAR TO LOSE HONORABLE DISCHARGES

"... combat veterans who have returned from tours in Iraq and become well-known anti-war advocates have seen the military recommend them for less-than-honorable discharges... Trying to punish fellow Americans for exercising the same democratic rights we're trying to instill in Iraq..."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-protest_bdjun24,1,3980880.story?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true

IRAQ WAR EDUCATING NEW TERRORISTS

"With U.S. forces putting the pressure on al Qaeda strongholds and the military admitting top leaders have escaped, intelligence agencies have come to an ominous conclusion: Al Qaeda fighters who slip away are ready to expand their fight to Europe and the Gulf... The jihadi veterans of Iraq are battled-hardened survivors of the world's toughest urban guerilla fighting, against some of the world's best soldiers... Iraq is a university of terrorism... "They've been able to learn how to miniaturize bombs, how to surveil, how to countersurveil, how to snipe, how to escape, how to use safe houses, how to disguise themselves... And how to move around the region with ease.... Trained in war, committed to destruction, some of them may be headed our way."
http://kdka.com/topstories/topstories_story_173190438.html

THE CAUSE OF PTSD

"All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq... are swiftly placed in... “atrocity-producing situations"... The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing. American Marines and soldiers have become, after four years of war, acclimated to atrocity.... The reality of the war—the fact that the occupation forces have become, along with the rampaging militias, a source of terror to most Iraqis—is not transmitted to the American public... The reality and the mythic narrative of war collide when embittered combat veterans return home. They find themselves estranged from the world around them, a world that still believes in the myth of war and the virtues of the nation... The veterans who return, even if they do not speak about the atrocities they have committed or witnessed in Iraq, will spend the rest of their lives coping with what they have done. They will suffer delayed reactions to stress...."
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070618_a_culture_of_atrocity/

BAGHDAD EMBASSY STAFF INADEQUATE

"... the embassy in Baghdad... lacks enough well-qualified staff members and... its security rules are too restrictive for Foreign Service officers to do their jobs..."
--Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/18/AR2007061801503.html?hpid=topnews

IRAQ RANKED NO. 2 IN FAILED STATES

"Iraq has emerged as the world's second most unstable country, behind Sudan... The 2007 Failed States Index, produced by Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund for Peace, said Iraq suffered a third straight year of deterioration in 2006... the leading benchmarks for failed state status is the loss of physical control of territory or a monopoly on the legitimate use of force... the erosion of legitimate authority, an inability to provide reasonable public services and the inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community..."
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2007-06-18T140951Z_01_N18374264_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ-USA-STATES.xml

IRAQIS JOINING FORCES TO END U.S. OCCUPATION

"... Iraqi security forces... were joined by members of the 1920s Revolutionary Brigade, who have rejected a long-standing alliance with Al Qaeda, and witnesses said the combined force was welcomed with demands from residents for more help in... ridding Iraq of the Americans. “Why didn’t you do this in the past?” said a man... “If you work together you can secure Iraq, and the occupation will have no choice but to leave. But if you stay divided, Al Qaeda will stay and the occupation will stay...”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/18/world/middleeast/18cnd-Iraq.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

U.S. REFUSAL TO WITHDRAW FUELS THE WAR

"... Iraq is occupied by U.S. forces. That fact hasn't been changed by Iraq's creation of a parliament, the election of a new government or the establishment of relative quiet in some parts of the country. Millions of Iraqis perceive the occupation as a national humiliation. That fuels sectarian conflicts, civil strife and continuing instability... The Bush administration... refuses to do the one thing that would really aid that country: develop a strategy for withdrawal..."
--Mikhail Gorbachev
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/225995

PSTD TREATMENT

"I've shot kids. I've had to kill kids. Sometimes I look at my son and like, I've killed a kid his age," Cruz said. "At times we had to drop a shell into somebody's house. When you go clean up the mess, you had three, four, five, six different kids in there. You had to move their bodies."
"... the Army gave him an honorable discharge, asserting that he had a "personality disorder" that made him unfit for military service. This determination implied that all his psychological problems existed before his first enlistment. It also disqualified him from receiving combat-related disability pay. There was little attempt to tie his condition to his experience in Iraq..."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/16/AR2007061600866_4.html?hpid=topnews

"... Two doctors diagnosed Walker with... PTSD, directly related to his close encounters with violence in Iraq... He was splattered with human flesh and shrapnel in a dining hall when a suicide bomber blew himself up... But Walker was not a combat soldier. He was a civilian recreation supervisor for KBR, the largest contractor in Iraq. And instead of getting the medical and counseling help he sought, Walker, a U.S. Army veteran, found himself caught in a morass of red tape and rejected insurance claims...."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-trauma17jun17,0,2296449.story?coll=la-home-center

AL QAEDA MOVING BEYOND IRAQ

"... Al Qaeda... has made the U.S. military occupation in Iraq its primary recruiting ground... (and is) today is a global operation — with a well-oiled propaganda machine based in Pakistan, a secondary but independent base in Iraq, and an expanding reach in Europe”... (Al Qaeda) would likely set up new operations in northern Lebanon and Gaza and eventually try to provoke “all-out war” between the U.S. and Iran as part of a “grand strategy” aimed at “bleeding” Washington in much the same way that U.S.-backed mujahadin and their Arab allies bled the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s..."
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=38202

HAMAS VICTORY SHOWS FAILURE OF WAR ON TERROR IN IRAQ

"Bush and his... supporters have long argued that their "war on terrorism" was the solution. They've argued that the invasion of Iraq was done to protect the US and the world from terrorism. They've claimed that the Iraq experiment in invasion has made the world safer from terrorists. They've claimed that the Iraq quagmire was a way to bring democracy to the region. Now (Hamas)... victories in violently taking Gaza territory from Fatah is a clear and horrendous failure of the Bush... "war against terror". Hamas is an Islamofascist terrorist organization with stated intentions to destroy the nation of Israel. It is funded by Iran and an important part of the Islamist extremists' strategy for violently taking and holding power in the middle east... The world has become a far more dangerous, less stable place because of Bush..."
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_rob_kall_070615_hamas_victory_is_bus.htm

GEEEN ZONE INFILTRATED AND UNSAFE

"... militia infiltration is believed to be such that no-one walks anywhere in the Green Zone for fear of being snatched off the street... if the coalition cannot even guarantee its own safety in the heart of its power base, what hope for the rest of Baghdad?"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6756425.stm

BLOOD FOR OIL - THE U.S. MILITARY A GLOBAL OIL PROTECTION SERVICE

"... the protection of Persian Gulf oil became more important for the economic well-being of the United States, as articulated in President Jimmy Carter’s “Carter Doctrine” speech of January 23, 1980 as well as in President George H. W. Bush’s August 1990 decision to stop Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, which led to the first Gulf War — and, many would argue, the decision of the younger Bush to invade Iraq over a decade later. Along the way, the American military has been transformed into a “global oil-protection service” for the benefit of U.S. corporations and consumers, fighting overseas battles and establishing its bases to ensure that we get our daily fuel fix..."
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174810/michael_klare_the_pentagon_as_global_gas_guzzler

MULTIPLE PLANELOADS DUMPED 363 TONS OF $100 BILLS INTO IRAQ ($12 BILLION)

"In February... Rep. Henry Waxman's Committee on Oversight and Government Reform revealed fresh details of how the Coalition Provisional Authority dumped $12 billion in cash--in $100 bills--into Iraq in 2004. Multiple flights of huge C-130 transport planes were required to deliver 363 tons of greenbacks--a modest portion of the $510 billion we have spent so far in Iraq and Afghanistan..."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070625/miller

FIGHTING FOR AN EXIT STRATEGY

"... An “exit strategy” from Iraq that depends on fighting rather than political agreements will wash Baghdad’s streets in blood... Much of it American blood. What... are we fighting for? To avoid a humiliating and bloody retreat from Baghdad? Is this what our soldiers are killing and dying for? Or to prevent a defeat that has been brought on by corrupt leadership at the highest level of our government? Or to prop up an incompetent administration in Washington until the next election? Historically, the result of such misguided policies is always the same: Dead fighters on both sides... dead civilians. And humiliation for the invaders... Now is the time... to forge a truce that will permit General Petraeus and his army to leave Baghdad with some semblance of military honor."
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/13/1858/

1 IN 6 U.S. TRAINED IRAQI POLICE ARE LOST

"About one in six Iraqi policemen trained by US-led forces were killed, wounded, deserted or just disappeared... That will mean 20,000 more soldiers to be trained this year and yet another increase in 2008..."
--Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, former commander of U.S. military's training effort in Iraq, testifying to House Armed Services Committee
http://www.theage.com.au/news/World/Iraq-losing-one-in-six-police-official/2007/06/14/1181414409866.html

SURGE HAS SHIFTED IRAQ VIOLENCE TO PROVINCES

"Three months into the new U.S. military strategy that has sent tens of thousands of additional troops into Iraq, overall levels of violence in the country have not decreased, as attacks have shifted away from Baghdad and Anbar, where American forces are concentrated, only to rise in most other provinces, according to a Pentagon report released yesterday... Violence fell in Baghdad and Anbar province, where the bulk of the 28,700 more U.S. troops are located, but escalated elsewhere as insurgents and militias regroup in eastern and northern Iraq..."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/13/AR2007061302357.html?hpid=topnews

BUSH MAY DUMP IRAQ ON THE U.N.

"... With the war turning out to be a huge political liability for the ruling Republican Party at the upcoming elections in November, it is a safe guess the White House may eventually dump Iraq on the United Nations... it is logical that Bush would now be interested in the United Nations helping out with Iraq. While turning Iraq into a land of carnage, the U.S. government has also done enormous damage to the United Nations by violating the U.N. Charter with the invasion, and then bringing the Security Council to heel as an endorser of the occupation... the White House is now seeking U.N. help in shouldering future responsibility and blame for the continuation of illegitimate and catastrophic military intervention in Iraq..."
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=38083

U.N. MIDEAST POLICY CALLED A SIDESHOW

"A former UN envoy to the Middle East has condemned its policy in the region for focusing to closely on the interests of the US and Israel... Alvaro de Soto, who quit in May, suggested that the UN should withdraw from the Quartet of Middle East negotiators calling it a "sideshow".
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/0E23448A-5980-48B1-AB27-492AEA0A77BD.htm

IRAQIS MISS SADDAM

"... Dempsey depicted the level of violence tolerated by Iraqis as "mind-numbing" and acknowledged that a dearth of security has made some Iraqis nostalgic for the rule of Saddam Hussein, who was ousted by the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. "You'll hear people say, 'You know, we were a lot more secure and safe during the Saddam regime,' " he told the oversight panel of the House Armed Services Committee..."
--Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, former commander of U.S. military's training effort in Iraq.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/12/AR2007061202179.html?hpid=topnews

IRAQI GOVERNMENT INCREASINGLY IRRELEVANT

"... deadlock has reached a point where many Iraqi and American officials now question whether any substantive laws will pass before the end of the year... doubts are spreading about whether the current benchmarks can ever halt the cycle of violence gripping Iraq’s communities... Previous American benchmarks like elections have failed to bring peace and, after four years of unfulfilled promises, bloodshed and sprawling chaos... Iraq’s central government has become increasingly irrelevant..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/world/middleeast/13benchmarks-iht.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin