January 30, 2008
Categories: Mass murder, Neo Cons, Nukes, Sibel Edmonds, War crimes, War profiteering . . Author: Travellerev . Comments: Leave a comment
The USAToday rapports this evening that the US air force has “taken the fight to the enemy. IN the biggest air raids since the war began the dropped 40.000 pounds of bombs on “al Qaeda” targets.
The operation, called “Phantom Phoenix,” is the third in a series of recent Iraq-wide offensives against al-Qaeda. That makes the past six months the heaviest uptick in offensive operations since the 2004 battles in Fallujah and the Shiite shrine city of Najaf.
A military statement said two B-1 bombers and four F-16 fighters dropped the bombs on 40 targets in Arab Jabour in 10 strikes.
Conway said 35 al-Qaeda militants were killed and 25 houses and 13 vehicles were destroyed.
This seems a meagre harvest of enemy deaths against the huge amount of bombs dropped in one of only series of raids in the last 6 months. The series is reported to be the biggest since the attacks on Falluja.
A Dutch news paper het Parool paints an entirely different picture.
According to the news paper quoting the Council of Ulema’s a council of influential Sunni spiritual leaders, the US air force committed horrific crimes. According to the council they “flattened” entire neighbourhoods around the city of Arab Jabour south of Bagdad.
The counsil spoke of many deaths. In the first 10 minutes alone 38 bombs fell on Arab Anjour. The article also states that it was more than 20.000 kg of bombs.
According to the council there were no al Qaeda basis in the region and the inhabitants were mainly farmers.
According to the same article Alayne Conway the commander overseeing the attacks it was the biggest carpet bombing operation since the beginning of the war and it preceded an ground attack covering the same area.
NICHOLAS BLANFORD/BEIRUT
Is Israel laying the ground for pre-emptive air strikes against targets belonging to the militant Shi’ite group Hizballah in Lebanon?
Tensions have been building along the Lebanon-Israel border in recent days. The Israeli army was engaged last week in large-scale military exercises in northern Israel, close to the border with Lebanon, putting into practice the lessons learned from last year’s 34-day war against Hizballah. The exercises took place at the same time as Israeli jets conducted a growing number of mock air raids and overflights in Lebanese airspace. Israeli aircraft fly in Lebanese airspace on a near daily basis, but last week Lebanese army anti-aircraft units fired at the jets for the first time since the end of the war.
Imperial Playground in The Post Cold War Era
After Iran-Contra, and the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted until 1988, new developments began to occur in the region of and around Iran, which have a great deal to do with the current situation we are facing today. In 1989, George H.W. Bush became President, and, after pardoning all the former Contra criminals who kept his part in the Affair secret, had his eyes set on the Middle East as well. This was also an extremely pivotal point in history, as in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, which was the great symbol of the division between the West and the Soviet Union. Before the world, the Soviet Union began to collapse, just as Brzezinski had hoped, as the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan ended in 1989, with the Soviets defeated.
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Apart from the fact that no reasonable human being would want Blackwater anywhere near were they live, why does a private mercenary firm need three bases spread all over the country? Why is a private mercenary firm accused of war crimes, who has withdrawn from their lobbying organisation for fear of an investigation into their professional conduct allowed to train American police officers? There are only a thousand Blackwater mercenaries in Iran, so what else do they do on those bases? And let’s not forget that they also have a fourth base in the Philippines.(Travellerev)
By Pat Sherman 10/09/2007
Blackwater USA Vice President Brian Bonfiglio flashed a self-satisfied smile, gazing east across Round Potrero Road where, on Sunday, more than 200 Potrero residents and antiwar activists streamed onto an adjacent parcel of land. They had come-some from as far as Ventura-to protest the 824-acre paramilitary training facility the company hopes to open a mile down the snaky dirt road.”I don’t think the war profiteering signs are appropriate, quite frankly,” Bonfiglio said. “At the end of the day, this will be determined as a land-use project by the [San Diego County] Board of Supervisors.”
As the public face of the project-dubbed Blackwater West-it’s Bonfiglio’s job to sell the facility as a non-invasive windfall to the residents of Potrero, a rural hamlet 45 miles east of San Diego. Given his employer’s image as a supplier of trigger-happy mercenary armies, unaccountable to neither the Iraqi nor American governments, wooing Potrero’s 850 residents has been a dicey game. Five members of the Potrero Planning Board who voted in December to support the project are facing a recall election. Some 320 residents signed a petition opposing the project that was sent to the county Board of Supervisors and Congressman Bob Filner, the Democrat whose district includes Potrero.
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BAGHDAD (AFP) — Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Wednesday that Blackwater should leave the country because of the mountain of evidence against the under-fire US security firm.
His comments came amid growing anger among Iraqis that “above-the-law” security contractors are continuing to operate in Iraq while Blackwater is being probed over a deadly shooting 17 days ago.
“I believe the abundance of evidence against it makes it unfit to stay in Iraq,” Maliki told a televised press conference in Baghdad.
A New York Times report on Wednesday citing witnesses, Iraqi investigators and a US official said that as many as 17 people were killed and 24 wounded when Blackwater employees opened fire in central Baghdad on September 16.
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According to Jeremy Scahills exellent book about Blackwater USA, he acctually has partaken in some military actions in Afghanistan.
He is a trained marine who has seen action in former Yoegoslavia and only quit the army when his father died and his wife was ill with cancer. Handy to have a billion or so lying around to build a private army with. Also very handy to know Cheney from his internship in the Whitehouse in 1992 accidently the same time Cheney asked Halliburton to research the possibility of privatizong the army.
Maybe he can’t kill anymore but he can sure let his boys do it for him. Also it probably helps to have converted back to Catholisism after all he’s fighting the Moslem infidels and GOD is on his side.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — The State Department’s initial report of last month’s incident in which Blackwater guards were accused of killing Iraqi civilians was written by a Blackwater contractor working in the embassy security detail, according to government and industry sources.
In this September 24 photo, an Iraqi looks at a car that was destroyed during the September 16 incident.
A source involved in diplomatic security at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad said a Blackwater contractor, Darren Hanner, drafted the two-page “spot report” on the letterhead of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security for the embassy’s Tactical Operations Center.
That office — which tracks and monitors all incidents and movements involving diplomatic security missions — has outsourced positions to Blackwater and another private firm, the embassy source said.
A highly placed industry source said that Hanner, who was listed on the report as the TOC watch officer, was working for Blackwater at the time the report was written, just after the September 16 incident occurred. He was to rotate out of Iraq this past week, the source said.
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merican diplomats have been ordered to compile a dossier detailing Iran’s violations of international law that some fear could be used to justify military strikes against the Islamic republic’s nuclear programme.US trains Gulf air forces for war with Iran
Members of the US secretariat in the United Nations were asked earlier this month to begin “searching for things that Iran has done wrong”, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.
Some US diplomats believe the exercise – reminiscent of attempts by vice-president Dick Cheney and the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld to build the case against Saddam Hussein before the Iraq war – will boost calls for military action by neo-conservatives inside and outside the administration.
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Paul Joseph Watson
Monday, October 1, 2007
‘Report: Russia Evacuates Entire Bushehr Staff’
Iranian and Israeli news outlets are reporting that Russia has evacuated its entire staff of nuclear engineers and experts who were working at the Bushehr nuclear reactor, increasing speculation that the United States is preparing an imminent military attack on Iran.
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Ros Taylor
Sunday September 30, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
John Bolton: ‘I think we have to look at a limited strike against their nuclear facilities.’ Photograph Win McNamee/Getty Images. |
John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, told Tory delegates today that efforts by the UK and the EU to negotiate with Iran had failed and that he saw no alternative to a pre-emptive strike on suspected nuclear facilities in the country.Mr Bolton, who was addressing a fringe meeting organised by Lord (Michael) Ancram, said that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was “pushing out” and “is not receiving adequate push-back” from the west.
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There’s an itch that I haven’t been able to scratch in the past couple of days. The State Department has forbidden Blackwater, LLC from providing documents to a congressional subcommittee investigating security contractors in Iraq. In particular, Henry Waxman’s committee is looking into the Blackwater Massacre in Baghdad – but is getting stonewalled every inch of the way…
Commentary By: Richard BlairKiazan Moneypenny has been in the news over the last day or so. Who’s Ms. Moneypenny, you might ask? She’s the State Department contract official who directed Blackwater not to disclose any information to the congressional committee investigating the Blackwater Massacre in Iraq without State Department approval. Her title at State is Contracting Officer – Office of Acquisition Management.
But it wasn’t always so. In fact, it was only recently that she acquired the title.
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Saddam Hussein offered to step down and go into exile one month before the invasion of Iraq, it was claimed last night.
Fearing defeat, Saddam was prepared to go peacefully in return for £500million ($1billion).
The extraordinary offer was revealed yesterday in a transcript of talks in February 2003 between George Bush and the then Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar at the President’s Texas ranch.
The White House refused to comment on the report last night.
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The following is the full text of the letter:
Mr. Lee Bollinger
Columbia University President
We, the professors and heads of universities and research institutions in Tehran, hereby announce our displeasure and protest at your impolite remarks prior to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent speech at Columbia University.
We would like to inform you that President Ahmadinejad was elected directly by the Iranian people through an enthusiastic two-round poll in which almost all of the country’s political parties and groups participated. To assess the quality and nature of these elections you may refer to US news reports on the poll dated June 2005.
Your insult, in a scholarly atmosphere, to the president of a country with a population of 72 million and a recorded history of 7,000 years of civilization and culture is deeply shameful.
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The U.S. military is adding a base just 5 miles from the Iran-Iraq border. (ABC News)
From World News with Charles Gibson
It will be called Combat Outpost Shocker, and it will hardly come as a pleasant surprise to Iran that the United States will have a new base just 5 miles from their border. Col. Mark Mueller, of the 3rd Infantry Division, said it is the first time the U.S. military will be that close to Iran.
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The following photos provide a pictorial glimpse of Hitler, how his Nazis mixed religion with government, and the support for Hitler by the Protestant and Catholic Churches in Germany. In, no way, does this gallery of photos intend to support Nazism or anti-Semitism, but instead, intends to warn against them. |
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Hitler With Whip (acting like ‘Jesus’)
Hitler’s close friend, Dietrich Eckart, told of overhearing Hitler showing off to a lady by denouncing Berlin in extravagant terms: “. . . the luxury, the perversion, the iniquity, the wanton display and the Jewish materialism disgusted me so thoroughly that I was almost beside myself. I nearly imagined myself to be Jesus Christ when he came to his Father’s Temple and found the money changers.” Eckart described Hitler as “brandishing his whip and exclaimed that it was his mission to descend upon the capital like a Christ and scourge the corrupt.”
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I also wish to emphasize that I reject anti-Semitism and all forms of Fashism or Totalitarianism.
George Bush [left] in al-Anbar province in Iraq [Reuters] |
The ‘Ghost of Anbar’ – also known as Abu Risha, the man behind the US success story in Iraq’s Anbar province, was brutally murdered in a roadside bomb this week.
As a result, People & Power revisit ‘Anbar’s Ghost’ which was shot just weeks before his death.
The story behind Abu Risha’s so-called success fuels with controversy. US officials credit him with leading Sunni tribes who killed Americans in the past into a new alliance with them.
Because of Abu Risha, American political and military leaders say, Sunni attacks on US forces have dropped dramatically and life is beginning to return to normal in Anbar, once the heartland of the Sunni Insurgency.
But was Abu Risha everything he claimed to be?
Filmmakers Rick Rowley and David Enders set off to find out – and to see who is paying the price.
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An Open Letter to the New Generation of Military Officers Serving and Protecting Our Nation
By Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Lt. Col., USAF, ret., National Commander, The Patriots
9/14/07
“The Nuremberg Principles says that we in the military have not only the right, but also the DUTY to refuse an illegal order. It was on this basis that we executed Nazi officers who were ‘only carrying out their orders’… The Constitution which we are sworn to uphold says that treaties entered into by the United States are the ‘highest law of the land,’ equivalent to the Constitution itself. Accordingly, we in the military are sworn to uphold treaty law, including the United Nations charter and the Geneva Convention… Based on the above, I contend that should some civilian order you to initiate a nuclear attack on Iran (for example), you are duty-bound to refuse that order. I might also suggest that you should consider whether the circumstances demand that you arrest whoever gave the order as a war criminal.”
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