3 coalition soldiers were killed when they were fired upon by a member of the al-Madaen city council, a town about 40 klicks south of Baghdad.
Heck of a job there, Bushie….A member of the city council opening up with an AK on our troops.
Category: Iraq
No Bid Contracts
Well, it looks like the Iraqi oil ministry, likely on the advice of the American advisers who work there, have cut some deals with some oile companies for field maintenance
Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for No-Bid Contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.
(emphasis mine)
No bid contracts…says it all.
U.S. Pins Car Boming on Sadr Groups
This assertion is highly suspect. The idea that Sadr’s Mahdi militia, a Shia militant group, and one which has no history of things like this, just bombed a market in a Shi’ite neighborhood…
I call bull sh@#.
“There is no longer any doubt that the current administration committed war crimes.”
So says retired Antonio Taguba, who oversaw the review of the Abu Ghraib scandal, and was then forced out when the report told the truth, in the introduction to the report from Physicians for Human Rights on torture under US detention, which uses, among other things, the roadmap of scars on its victims:
Neither the Bush administration nor the Pentagon commented on the unpublished report yesterday. President Bush has repeatedly said he does not condone torture and allows interrogation techniques that are aggressive but legal.
The report challenges that contention with a detailed physical and psychological profile of each of the former detainees. In two of the cases, the medical investigators had access to the subjects’ recent medical records. All 11 men were given pseudonyms for their protection, according to the report.
The doctors found that “Kamal,” an Iraqi in his late 40s held from September 2003 until June 2004 at Abu Ghraib, has a lesion near his right ear that is “consistent with a healed cut from a sharp-edged instrument,” according to the report. He also had another wound by his left ear, described as “a healed puncture injury” that matches “Kamal’s description of being stabbed with a screwdriver in his cheek by a soldier,” the report states.
Psychologically, “Kamal’s clinical presentation, reported history of abuse, and the result of psychological testing support the presence of several psychiatric diagnoses,” including depression, a panic disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the report.
A subject named “Amir,” an Iraqi in his late 20s held in Abu Ghraib prison from August 2003 to January 2005, “showed signs of rectal tearing that are highly consistent with his report of having been sodomized with a broomstick,” the report found.
“Yasser,” another Abu Ghraib detainee in his mid-40s, had scars on his thumbs and irregularities in the contours of his tongue, according to the report. The medical team concluded that the damage supports his contention that his American captors subjected him to electric shocks.
The problem here torture always follows the soldiers home. The people who were ordered to to this will come home, and many of them will end up in law enforcement, where they will do the same to someone who they think is not sufficiently respectful at a traffic stop.
The only answer is accountability at the very highest levels. By this, I do not mean that it stops at Rumsfeld. Bush and Cheney need to spend most of the rest of their lives in jail.
Threat of Demand to Leave in Iraq Status of Forces Agreement
It appears that Nouri al-Maliki is suggesting that it is possible that US forces will be asked to leave.
This is not, I think, a real position, but it indicates that he and his allies are willing to play some hardball in the negotiations.
Were US troops to leave, half the parliament, as well as Maliki, would be strung up from lamp posts in the next month.
Can We Impeach Him Now?
Well, we now have the definitive word on when Bush knew that there was no Iraq-al Queida link, and that he continued to claim such a link
In October 2002, a few weeks before Congress voted to authorize the Iraq invasion, Bush told a crowd in Cincinnati: “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gasses.”
Problem is, it wasn’t true. More importantly, a lot of people at the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency knew it probably wasn’t true. That’s one of the interesting revelations inside the Senate’s recent 171-page Phase II report on whether White House statements were backed up by prewar intelligence.
He knew. He knew since February 2002.
It turns out that their source was one guy, who had most of the information tortured out of him, and none of whose claims ever panned out.
Impeach Dick Cheney today. Impeach George W. Bush tomorrow.
Halliburton/KBR Stories
It now appears that the contract manager for a multi billion KBR contract was forced out after insisting for documentation for the invoices that they were sending in.
Delightful….Dick Cheney’s company, under a policy created by SecDef Dick Cheney, was allowed to submit smudged receipts on cocktail napkins.
Iraqis Choosing Go Slow on Status of Forces Agreement
Yet another sign that everyone is treating Bush as a lame duck.
Truth be told, it’s also because Bush and His Evil Minions™ want an agreement that can only be described as a colonial relationship, where Iraq has little or none of the authority that would ordinarily be ascribed to a nation state.
Muqtada al-Sadr Rolling Out New Force Devoted to Expelling US from Iraq
This is a very canny move for him.
The overwhelming majority of Iraqis want the US out, and with US demands for the status of forces agreement, they know that the US does not intend to leave.
Iraq PM Says Status of Forces at Impasse
Considering the US Demands, double the number of bases, control of airspace, the right to detain Iraqi citizens, and the right to declare war on behalf of Iraq, I’m not surprised that even that most obsequious of puppets, Nouri al-Maliki, simply cannot stomach this.
Is the Proposed Iraq-US Military Agreement a Back Door to An Iran Strike?
Faiz at Think Progress notes the following troubling detail in the proposed agreement, which a Dawa MP has objected to:
The Americans insist so far that is they who define what is an aggression on Iraq and what is democracy inside Iraq…if we come under aggression we should define it and ask for help.
This means that the US could use the status of forces agreement to justify an attack on Iran.
As Faiz puts it, “Since the administration is unlikely to get an Iran war authorized through Congress, it’s instead trying to sneak it through the Iraqi parliament.”
Bush May Not Get His Iraq Deal
At least that’s what unnamed sources are saying. They are expecting a short term extension of the UN mandate.
Considering the fact that they are asking for immunity for mercenary thugs like Black Water, the right to engage in attacks without consulting the Iraqi government, near complete control of their airspace, and 58 bases in Iraq, it’s nor surprising that Maliki is not happy about this deal.
Did Iranian agents dupe Pentagon officials?
It appears that there is evidence that Iranian intelligence operatives infiltrated the various Iraqi and Iranian exile groups that called for war against Iraq in 2002-2003.
The aborted counterintelligence investigation probed some Pentagon officials’ contacts with Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar, whom the CIA had labeled a “fabricator” in 1984. Those contacts were brokered by an American civilian, Michael Ledeen, a former Pentagon and National Security Council consultant and a leading advocate of invading Iraq and overthrowing Iran’s Islamic regime.
According to the Senate report, the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity unit concluded in 2003 that Ledeen “was likely unwitting of any counterintelligence issues related to his relationship with Mr. Ghorbanifar.”
There is also Achmed Chalabi and the INC, though they are not mentioned in this article.
The Pentagon started an investigation of it, but Rumsfeld shut it down when he heard of it.
Read the complete article, including the hair brained scheme to overthrow the mullahs with ….. traffic jams.
4 Years ago, Matthew Yglesias suggested, tongue in cheek, that GW Bush was an Iranian mole…I now wonder how funny it really was….I’m just saying.
Bush and His Evil Minions™ Attempt to Blackmail Iraq Into Signing Away Sovereignty
It appears that the US is threatening the Iraqi government with the loss of $50 billion in reserves in US banks in order to make them sign Bush’s “Iraq Forever” deal:
The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq’s money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, according to information leaked to The Independent.
US negotiators are using the existence of $20bn in outstanding court judgments against Iraq in the US, to pressure their Iraqi counterparts into accepting the terms of the military deal, details of which were reported for the first time in this newspaper yesterday.
Iraq’s foreign reserves are currently protected by a presidential order giving them immunity from judicial attachment but the US side in the talks has suggested that if the UN mandate, under which the money is held, lapses and is not replaced by the new agreement, then Iraq’s funds would lose this immunity. The cost to Iraq of this happening would be the immediate loss of $20bn. The US is able to threaten Iraq with the loss of 40 per cent of its foreign exchange reserves because Iraq’s independence is still limited by the legacy of UN sanctions and restrictions imposed on Iraq since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the 1990s. This means that Iraq is still considered a threat to international security and stability under Chapter Seven of the UN charter. The US negotiators say the price of Iraq escaping Chapter Seven is to sign up to a new “strategic alliance” with the United States.
This is why the Iraqis are looking at petitioning the UN Security Council to extend the current mandate, which expires in December.
If they were to extend this by 6 months or a year, it would be to their advantage, and I can’t see the Bush administration vetoing this, it would put them and the US, in an absolutely untenable position diplomatically.
Then again, you can’t go broke overestimating the stupidity and venality of Bush and His Evil Minions.™
Senate Intelligence Committee Report Says the Bush Lied
That’s what the report translates to, “Policymakers’ statements did not accurately convey the intelligence assessments”.
Impeach Dick Cheney today. Impeach George W. Bush tomorrow.
Bush’s “Iraq Forever” Deal In Trouble
A majority of Iraq members of parliament have signed a letter to Congress rejecting Bush’s security agreement, which allows for 50 bases, control of Iraqi airspace, the right to arrest, immunity for US troops and contractors, and the ability to operate militarily without permission. (More details here)
Given how well US occupation has served the needs of the Iraqi people, this comes as no surprise, nor does Iranian rhetoric claiming that this deal is designed to enslave Iraqis.
Of particular interest is that Grand Ayatollah Sistani is not particularly supportive of the agreement, and appears to be demanding both parliamentary approval and a referendum, and there is no way that such a deal would pass on a referendum.
One shocker, to me at least, is that Ali Allawi, Ahmad Chalabi’s nephew, has written an article which appears to condemn the deal, making reference to the treaty with Britain in 1930.
One wonders if the Iraqis realize that Bush is a short-timer, and they are running out the clock in the hope of finding someone competent.
Australian Activists Present Brief to International Criminal Court Against Former PM John Howard
Meanwhile, the Australian Broadcast Corp. reported June 1 that a legal brief has been sent to the International Criminal Court alleging Howard committed a war crime by sending troops to Iraq. A loose alliance of peace activists, lawyers, academics and politicians is behind the brief, organized by the ICC Action Group, based in Melbourne.
One paragraph in the article, but I’m beginning to thing that we should think of filing similar briefs on Bush and His Evil Minions™, because justice will never be served in the USA.
Dems Set to Cave Again on Extension of Unemployment Benefits
Steny “Mr. Capitulation” Hoyer is saying that House Dems are, “likely to drop a 13-week extension of unemployment insurance benefits” from the Iraq supplemental.
This is both craven and stupid. Make the Republicans, and for that matter the Bush Blue Dogs, vote against the unemployment extension.
Not only is it good policy in an economy in a tailspin, it’s good politics, since the extension is popular.
It passed with 75 votes in the Senate. If Bush vetos it, come back again, and again, and again, and again.
Wimps.
Gaah!!!!! 40 Years!!!!
Muckraked has a review of the book War Journal, My Five Years in Iraq, and we find this quote:
“This is the great war of our times. It is going to take forty years,’” [Bush told Engel]. “Bush said in forty years the world would know if the war on terrorism, and conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, had reduced extremism, helped moderates, and promoted democracy.
And he doesn’t care if it works or not, because then he’ll be dead.
If there is any justice in the world, he will die in a prison cell.