AS THE WORLD SQUIRMSâ
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
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US death toll in Iraq passes 3500
Sunday: 4 GIs, 116 Iraqis Killed; 49 Iraqis Wounded Monday: 8 GIs, 123 Iraqis Killed; 131 Iraqis Wounded DC Notes: Disability claims from Iraq, Afghanistan vets top
176,000
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Red Cross confirms Bush
administration, CIA used torture CBS News August 7, 2007 (Excerpt) The
CIA's interrogation of high-value detainees began in March 2002 with the
capture of al Qaeda operative Abu Zubayadah. "Lacking in-house specialists on
interrogation, the agency hired a
group of outside contractors, who implemented a regime of
techniques that one well-informed former adviser to the American intelligence
community described as 'a "Clockwork Orange" kind of
approach,'" Mayer reports. Retired military psychologists who had
trained Special Forces soldiers how to survive torture essentially modified
the program and used
their "expertise to help interrogators inflict abuse,"
Mayer reports. "They were very arrogant, and
pro-torture," an unnamed European official knowledgeable about the
program told Mayer. "They sought to render the detainees vulnerable --
to break down all their senses." |
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American Spreads Hiroshima’s Nuclear Legacy MSNBC August
4, 2007 (Excerpt) TOKYO - Sixty-two
years later, the memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima still holds such a
grip on Japan that its defense minister has had to resign simply for
suggesting the attack was "unavoidable.” Now, in a sign of changing times, the
task of spreading Hiroshima's message to the world has been entrusted to an
American, a citizen of the country that dropped the bomb on Aug. 6, 1945. Monday's
anniversary comes just a month after Fumio Kyuma was forced to quit as
defense minister for seeming to implying that the bombing was inevitable,
because otherwise Japan would have gone on fighting and would have lost
territory to a Soviet invasion. Not so, says Steven
Leeper, the first American to head the Hiroshima Peace and Culture
Foundation. "Historically, that's not correct," he said in an
interview, "And it's unbelievable that he said it."Leeper shares
the view of most Japanese: that Japan had already lost the war and that the
bombing of Hiroshima, and of Nagasaki three days later, was wrong and
unnecessary. "Everybody
knows on the left and the right that Japan was finished at the time the bomb
was dropped," Leeper said. Historically,
the American justification was that the bombing ended the war and limited the
number of U.S. military and Japanese civilian lives that would have been lost
in a land invasion. The Japanese perspective argues that Japan was already
working on negotiating a peace treaty, as well as a surrender, and that the U.S. dropped the bomb to
test its destructive power and to intimidate the Soviet Union. |
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Beyond Disaster: The war in Iraq is
about to get worse—much worse By Chris Hedges Truthdig.com August 6, 2007 (Excerpt) The war in Iraq is about to get worse—much worse. The Democrats’ decision to let the war run its course,
while they frantically disown responsibility, means that it will
sputter and stagger forward until the mission collapses.
This will be
sudden. The security of the Green Zone, our imperial city, will be
increasingly breached. Command and control will disintegrate. And
we will back out of Iraq humiliated and defeated. But this will not be
the end of the conflict. It will, in fact, signal a phase of the war
far deadlier and more dangerous to American interests. Iraq no longer exists as a unified country.
The experiment that was Iraq, the cobbling together of disparate and
antagonistic patches of the Ottoman Empire by the victorious powers
in the wake of World War I, belongs to the history books. It will never
come back. The Kurds have set up a de facto state in the north, the
Shiites control most of the south and the center of the country is a
battleground. There are: ·
2 million Iraqis who
have fled their homes and are internally displaced. ·
Another 2 million
have left the country, most to Syria and Jordan, which now has the largest
number of refugees per capita of any country on Earth. ·
An Oxfam report
estimates that one in three Iraqis are in need of emergency aid, but the
chaos and violence is so widespread that assistance is impossible. Iraq
is in a state of anarchy. The American occupation forces are one more source of
terror tossed into the caldron of suicide bombings, mercenary armies,
militias, massive explosions, ambushes, kidnappings and mass
executions. But wait until we leave. It was not
supposed to turn out like this. Remember all those visions of a
democratic Iraq, visions peddled by the White House and fatuous pundits like Thomas Friedman and
the gravel-voiced morons who pollute our airwaves on CNN and Fox News?
They assured us that the war would be a cakewalk. We would be greeted
as liberators. Democracy would seep out over the borders of Iraq to
usher in a new Middle East. Now, struggling to salvage their own
credibility, they blame the debacle on poor planning and mismanagement.  By SAMEER N.
YACOUB, Associated
Press Writer August 6, 2007 (Excerpt) BAGHDAD - Iraq's political crisis worsened Monday
as five more ministers announced a boycott of Cabinet meetings — leaving the embattled prime minister's unity
government with no members affiliated with Sunni political factions.  America's 'Terror Wars' and the
‘quiet’, ignored lessons of
Northern Ireland The Boston Globe August 2, 2007 (Excerpt) The
conduct of this campaign and the way it ended provide lessons to the United
States today, if only we are prepared to learn them. Instead we seem intent, just like the British in Northern
Ireland, on learning only from our own mistakes.  By James
Carroll International Herald Tribune, France (via The
Boston Globe) August 6, 2007 (Excerpt) Regarding Iraq, the answer
is clear: My nation keeps the conflagration burning. Like
legions of Americans, I have long since concluded that the Iraq war is
misbegotten and must end, but I helplessly watch as it careens along, like a
runaway train from an old movie, with "responsible" figures from
the Pentagon to the White House to Congress to opinion makers continually
pouring more fuel into its boilers. Throttle on! Here
is the disconnect that matters this August: A vast population of shamed American
citizens, seeing the war as key to multiple unfolding disasters, regard it as
the most pressing issue in the world. But so what? Private brooding
desperately seeks a mode of public action, yet is thwarted. The American myth is
that such concern gives form to the political process, never more so than
during a presidential election. But there, too, as the candidate debates
steadily show, the defining note is one of ineffectual detachment.  ~INTERVIEW~ Sheldon Richman, editor of The
Freeman, discusses the history of American
imperialism and the growth of domestic government since America lost
the Spanish-American war, the roots of Anti-American terrorism (Bush I and
Bill Clinton), laissez faire economics, libertarianism and social Darwinism. Click
Here For MP3 Audio Stream Sheldon
Richman is editor of The Freeman, published
by The Foundation for Economic Education |
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Media Blitz for War: The Big Guns of
August by Norman Solomon AntiWar.com August 3, 2007 (Excerpt) This week the U.S. media establishment is mainlining
another fix for the Iraq war: It isn't so bad after all, American military
power could turn wrong into right, chronic misleaders now serve as
truth-tellers. The hit is that the war must go on. When the White House chief of staff Andrew
Card said five years ago that "you don't introduce new products in
August," he was explaining the need to defer an all-out PR campaign for
invading Iraq until early fall. But this year, August isn't a bad month to
launch a sales pitch for a new and improved Iraq war. Bad products must be
re-marketed to counteract buyers' remorse. "War critics" who have
concentrated on decrying the lack of U.S. military progress in Iraq are now
feeling the hoist from their own petards. But that's to be expected. Those
who complain that the war machine is ineffective are asking for more
effective warfare even when they think they're demanding peace. If Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack
didn't exist, they'd have to be invented. The duo's op-ed piece Monday in the
New York Times, under the
headline "A
War We Just Might Win," was boilerplate work from elite
foreign-policy technicians packaging themselves as "two analysts who
have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of
Iraq." A recent eight-day officially guided tour led them to conclude
that "we are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military
terms." Both men have always
been basic supporters of the Iraq war. O'Hanlon is a prolific writer at the
Brookings Institution. Pollack's credits include working at the CIA and
authoring the 2002 bestseller The
Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. In the years
since the candy and flowers failed to materialize, their critiques of the
Iraq war have been merely tactical.  Part 2 (Movie)
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