THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, TENTH THREAD.

That's easy. You will find that some people are like Agent Mulder from the X-Files, they want to believe.

I say skip the bullsh!t. Get with whats real.

A little late, amigo since this is what the tenth thread?

Meanwhile, this Iraq thing is coming apart at the seams. But according to folks like Ican, they're better off.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4768846.stm

What Bush Was Told About Iraq
What Bush Was Told About Iraq
By Murray Waas
The National Journal
Thursday 02 March 2006

Two highly classified intelligence reports delivered directly to President Bush before the Iraq war cast doubt on key public assertions made by the president, Vice President Cheney, and other administration officials as justifications for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein, according to records and knowledgeable sources.

The first report, delivered to Bush in early October 2002, was a one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate that discussed whether Saddam's procurement of high-strength aluminum tubes was for the purpose of developing a nuclear weapon.

Among other things, the report stated that the Energy Department and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research believed that the tubes were "intended for conventional weapons," a view disagreeing with that of other intelligence agencies, including the CIA, which believed that the tubes were intended for a nuclear bomb.

The disclosure that Bush was informed of the DOE and State dissents is the first evidence that the president himself knew of the sharp debate within the government over the aluminum tubes during the time that he, Cheney, and other members of the Cabinet were citing the tubes as clear evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program. Neither the president nor the vice president told the public about the disagreement among the agencies.

When U.S. inspectors entered Iraq after the fall of Saddam's regime, they determined that Iraq's nuclear program had been dormant for more than a decade and that the aluminum tubes had been used only for artillery shells.

The second classified report, delivered to Bush in early January 2003, was also a summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, this one focusing on whether Saddam would launch an unprovoked attack on the United States, either directly, or indirectly by working with terrorists.

The report stated that U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that it was unlikely that Saddam would try to attack the United States - except if "ongoing military operations risked the imminent demise of his regime" or if he intended to "extract revenge" for such an assault, according to records and sources.

The single dissent in the report again came from State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as INR, which believed that the Iraqi leader was "unlikely to conduct clandestine attacks against the U.S. homeland even if [his] regime's demise is imminent" as the result of a U.S. invasion.

On at least four earlier occasions, beginning in the spring of 2002, according to the same records and sources, the president was informed during his morning intelligence briefing that U.S. intelligence agencies believed it was unlikely that Saddam was an imminent threat to the United States.

However, in the months leading up to the war, Bush, Cheney, and Cabinet members repeatedly asserted that Saddam was likely to use chemical or biological weapons against the United States or to provide such weapons to Al Qaeda or another terrorist group.

The Bush administration used the potential threat from Saddam as a major rationale in making the case to go to war. The president cited the threat in an address to the United Nations on September 12, 2002, in an October 7, 2002, speech to the American people, and in his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003.

The one-page documents prepared for Bush are known as the "President's Summary" of the much longer and more detailed National Intelligence Estimates that combine the analysis and judgments of agencies throughout the intelligence community.

An NIE, according to the Web site of the National Intelligence Council - the interagency group that coordinates the documents' production - represents "the coordinated judgments of the Intelligence Community regarding the likely course of future events" and is written with the goal of providing "policy makers with the best, unvarnished, and unbiased information - regardless of whether analytic judgments conform to U.S. policy." (The January 2003 NIE, for example, was titled "Nontraditional Threats to the U.S. Homeland Through 2007.")

As many as six to eight agencies, foremost among them the CIA, the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the INR, contribute to the drafting of an NIE. If any one of those intelligence agencies disagrees with the majority view on major conclusions, the NIE includes the dissenting view.

The one-page summary for the president allows intelligence agencies to emphasize what they believe to be the conclusions from the broader NIE that are the most important to communicate to the commander-in-chief.

The President's Summary is among the most highly classified papers in the government. References to the summaries are contained in footnotes in the so-called Robb-Silberman report - officially, the report of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction - that was issued in March 2005 on the use of intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq. The White House has refused to declassify the summaries or to give them to congressional committees.

The summaries stated that both the Energy and State departments dissented on the aluminum tubes question. This is the first evidence that Bush was aware of the intense debate within the government during the time that he, Cheney, and members of the Cabinet were citing the procurement of the tubes as evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program.

In his address to the U.N. General Assembly on September 12, 2002, the president asserted, "Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon."

On October 7, 2002, less than a week after Bush was given the summary, he said in a speech in Cincinnati: "Evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his 'nuclear mujahedeen' - his nuclear holy warriors ... . Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."

On numerous other occasions, Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and then-U.N. Ambassador John Negroponte cited Iraq's procurement of aluminum tubes without disclosing that the intelligence community was split as to their end use. The fact that the president was informed of the dissents by Energy and State is also significant because Rice and other administration officials have said that Bush did not know about those dissenting views when he made claims about the purported uses for the tubes.

On July 11, 2003, aboard Air Force One during a presidential trip to Africa, Rice was asked about the National Intelligence Estimate and whether the president knew of the dissenting views among intelligence agencies regarding Iraq's procurement of the aluminum tubes.

Months earlier, disagreement existed within the administration over how to characterize the aluminum tubes in a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell gave to the U.N. on February 5, 2003. Breaking ranks with others in the administration, Powell decided to refer to the internal debate among government agencies over Iraq's intended use of the tubes.

Asked about this by a reporter on Air Force One, Rice said: "I'm saying that when we put [Powell's speech] together ... the secretary decided that he would caveat the aluminum tubes, which he did ... . The secretary also has an intelligence arm that happened to hold that view."

Rice added, "Now, if there were any doubts about the underlying intelligence to that NIE, those doubts were not communicated to the president, to the vice president, or to me."

The one-page October 2002 President's Summary specifically told Bush that although "most agencies judge" that the use of the aluminum tubes was "related to a uranium enrichment effort ... INR and DOE believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons uses."

The lengthier NIE - more than 90 pages - contained significantly more detail describing the disagreement between the CIA and the Pentagon's DIA on one hand, which believed that the tubes were meant for centrifuges, and State's INR and the Energy Department, which believed that they were meant for artillery shells. Administration officials had said that the president would not have read the full-length paper. They also had said that many of the details of INR's dissent were contained in a special text box that was positioned far away from the main text of the report.

But the one-page summary, several senior government officials said in interviews, was written specifically for Bush, was handed to the president by then-CIA Director George Tenet, and was read in Tenet's presence.

In addition, Rice, Cheney, and dozens of other high-level Bush administration policy makers received a highly classified intelligence assessment, known as a Senior Executive Memorandum, on the aluminum tubes issue. Circulated on January 10, 2003, the memo was titled "Questions on Why Iraq Is Procuring Aluminum Tubes and What the IAEA Has Found to Date."

The paper included discussion regarding the fact that the INR, Energy, and the United Nations atomic energy watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, all believed that Iraq was using the aluminum tubes for conventional weapons programs.

The lengthier NIE also contained a note regarding the aluminum tubes disagreement:

"In INR's view, Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes is central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, but INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors. INR accepts the judgment of technical experts at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) who have concluded that the tubes Iraq seeks to acquire are poorly suited for use in gas centrifuges to be used for uranium enrichment and finds unpersuasive the arguments advanced by others to make the case that they are intended for that purpose.

"INR considers it far more likely that the tubes are intended for another purpose, most likely the production of artillery rockets."

One week after Rice's comments aboard Air Force One, on July 18, 2003, the Bush administration declassified some portions of the NIE, including the passage quoted above, regarding INR's dissent regarding the aluminum tubes.

But the Bush administration steadfastly continued to refuse to declassify the President's Summary of the NIE, which in the words of one senior official, is the "one document which illustrates what the president knew and when he knew it." The administration also refused to furnish copies of the paper to congressional intelligence committees.

That a summary was also prepared for Bush on the question of Saddam's intentions regarding an unprovoked attack on the United States is significant because the administration has claimed that the president was unaware of intelligence information that conflicted with his public statements and those of the vice president and members of his Cabinet on the justifications for attacking Iraq.

According to interviews and records, Bush personally read the one-page summary in Tenet's presence during the morning intelligence briefing, and the two spoke about it at some length. Sources familiar with the summary said it was highly significant that the president was informed that it was the unanimous conclusion of the intelligence agencies participating in the production of the January 2003 NIE that Saddam was unlikely to consider attacking the U.S. unless Iraq was attacked first.

Cheney received virtually the same intelligence information, according to the same records and interviews. The president's summaries have been shared with the vice president as a matter of course during the Bush presidency.

The conclusion among intelligence agencies that Saddam was unlikely to consider attacking the United States unless attacked first was also outlined in Senior Executive Intelligence Briefs, highly classified daily intelligence papers distributed to several hundred executive branch officials and to the congressional intelligence oversight committees.

During the second half of 2002, the president and vice president repeatedly cited the threat from Saddam in their public statements. "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us," Cheney declared on August 26, 2002, to the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

In his September 12 address to the U.N. General Assembly, Bush said: "With every step the Iraqi regime takes toward gaining and deploying the most terrible weapons, our own options to confront that regime will narrow. And if an emboldened regime were to supply these weapons to terrorist allies, then the attacks of September the 11th would be a prelude to far greater horrors."

In an October 7 address to the nation, Bush cited intelligence showing that Iraq had a fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons. "We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States," the president declared.

"We know that Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy - the United States of America," he added. "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."

In his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address, the president once again warned the nation: "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option."

In March 2003, as American, British, and other military forces prepared to invade Iraq, the president repeated the warnings during a summit in the Azores islands of Portugal and in a March 17 speech to the nation on the eve of the war. "The danger is clear: Using chemical, biological, or, one day, nuclear weapons obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country," Bush said in the March 17 speech. "The United States and other nations did nothing to deserve or invite this threat. But we will do everything to defeat it."

Senior Bush administration officials say they had good reason to disbelieve the intelligence that was provided to them by the CIA, noting that the intelligence the agency had provided earlier regarding Iraq was flawed.

And more recently, a 511-page bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on prewar intelligence regarding Iraq concluded: "Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collected that helped analysis determine the Iraqi regime's possible links with Al Qaeda."

The White House declined to comment for this story. In a statement, Frederick Jones, a spokesman for the National Security Council said, "The president of the United States has talked about this matter directly, as have a myriad of other administration officials. At this juncture, we have nothing to add to that body of information."

The 9/11 commission concluded in its final report that no evidence existed of a "collaborative operational relationship" between Saddam and Al Qaeda, adding, "Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with Al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States."

The National Journal

Source for above;

Sorry, BBB, I gotta have sources.

Joe(they shoot sources, don't they?)Nation

Burying The Lancet Report
Burying The Lancet Report
By Nicolas J. S. Davies
Z Magazine
February 2006 Issue

Over a year ago an international team of epidemiologists, headed by Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, completed a "cluster sample survey" of civilian casualties in Iraq. Its findings contradicted central elements of what politicians and journalists had presented to the US public and the world. After excluding any possible statistical anomalies, they estimated that at least 98,000 Iraqi civilians had died in the previous 18 months as a direct result of the invasion and occupation of their country. They also found that violence had become the leading cause of death in Iraq during that period. Their most significant finding was that the vast majority (79 percent) of violent deaths were caused by "coalition" forces using "helicopter gunships, rockets or other forms of aerial weaponry," and that almost half (48 percent) of these were children, with a median age of 8.

When the team's findings were published in the Lancet, the official journal of the British Medical Association, they caused quite a stir and it seemed that the first step had been taken toward a realistic accounting of the human cost of the war. The authors made it clear that their results were approximate. They discussed the limitations of their methodology at length and emphasized that further research would be invaluable in giving a more precise picture.

A year later, we do not have a more precise picture. Soon after the study was published, US and British officials launched a concerted campaign to discredit its authors and marginalize their findings without seriously addressing the validity of their methods or presenting any evidence to challenge their conclusions. Today the continuing aerial bombardment of Iraq is still a dark secret to most Americans and the media present the same general picture of the war, focusing on secondary sources of violence.

Roberts has been puzzled and disturbed by this response to his work, which stands in sharp contrast to the way the same governments responded to a similar study he led in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2000. In that case, he reported that about 1.7 million people had died during 22 months of war and, as he says, "Tony Blair and Colin Powell quoted those results time and time again without any question as to the precision or validity." In fact the UN Security Council promptly called for the withdrawal of foreign armies from the Congo and the US State Department cited his study in announcing a grant of $10 million for humanitarian aid.

Roberts conducted a follow-up study in the Congo that raised the fatality estimate to three million and Tony Blair cited that figure in his address to the 2001 Labor Party conference. In December 2004 Blair dismissed the epidemiological team's work in Iraq, claiming, "Figures from the Iraqi Ministry of Health, which are a survey from the hospitals there, are in our view the most accurate survey there is."

This statement by Blair is particularly interesting because the Iraqi Health Ministry reports, whose accuracy he praised, have confirmed the Johns Hopkins team's conclusion that aerial attacks by "coalition" forces are the leading cause of civilian deaths. One such report was cited by Nancy Youssef in the Miami Herald of September 25, 2004 under the headline "US Attacks, Not Insurgents, Blamed for Most Iraqi Deaths." The Health Ministry had been reporting civilian casualty figures based on reports from hospitals, as Blair said, but it was not until June 2004 that it began to differentiate between casualties inflicted by "coalition" forces and those from other causes. From June 10 to September 10 it counted 1,295 civilians killed by US forces and their allies and 516 killed in "terrorist" operations. Health Ministry officials told Youssef that the "statistics captured only part of the death toll," and emphasized that aerial bombardment was largely responsible for the higher numbers of deaths caused by the "coalition." The breakdown (72 percent US) is remarkably close to that attributed to aerial bombardment in the Lancet survey (79 percent).

BBC World Affairs editor John Simpson, in another Health Ministry report covering July 1, 2004 to January 1, 2005, cited 2,041 civilians killed by US and allied forces versus 1,233 by "insurgents" (only 62 percent US). Then something strange happened. The Iraqi Health Minister's office contacted the BBC and claimed, in a convoluted and confusing statement, that their figures had somehow been misrepresented. The BBC issued a retraction and details of deaths caused by "coalition" forces have been notably absent from subsequent Health Ministry reports.

Official and media criticism of Roberts's work has focused on the size of his sample, 988 homes in 33 clusters distributed throughout the country, but other epidemiologists reject the notion that this is controversial.

Michael O'Toole, the director of the Center for International Health in Australia, says: "That's a classical sample size. I just don't see any evidence of significant exaggeration.... If anything, the deaths may have been higher because what they are unable to do is survey families where everyone has died."

David Meddings, a medical officer with the Department of Injuries and Violence Prevention at the World Health Organization, said that surveys of this kind always have uncertainty, but "I don't think the authors ignored that or understated. Those cautions I don't believe should be applied any more or less stringently to a study that looks at a politically sensitive conflict than to a study that looks at a pill for heart disease."

Roberts has also compared his work in Iraq to other epidemiological studies: "In 1993, when the US Centers for Disease Control randomly called 613 households in Milwaukee and concluded that 403,000 people had developed Cryptosporidium in the largest outbreak ever recorded in the developed world, no one said that 613 households was not a big enough sample. It is odd that the logic of epidemiology embraced by the press every day regarding new drugs or health risks somehow changes when the mechanism of death is their armed forces."

The campaign to discredit Roberts, the Johns Hopkins team, and the Lancet used the same methods that the US and British governments have employed consistently to protect their monopoly on "responsible" storytelling about the war. By dismissing the study's findings out of hand, US and British officials created the illusion that the authors were suspect or politically motivated and discouraged the media from taking them seriously. This worked disturbingly well. Even opponents of the war continue to cite much lower figures for civilian casualties and innocently attribute the bulk of them to Iraqi resistance forces or "terrorists."

The figures most often cited for civilian casualties in Iraq are those collected by Iraqbodycount, but its figures are not intended as an estimate of total casualties. Its methodology is to count only those deaths that are reported by at least two "reputable" international media outlets in order to generate a minimum number that is more or less indisputable. Its authors know that thousands of deaths go unreported in their count and say they cannot prevent the media misrepresenting their figures as an actual estimate of deaths.

Beyond the phony controversy regarding the methodology of the Lancet report, there is one issue that does cast doubt on its findings. This is the decision to exclude the cluster in Fallujah from its computations due to the much higher number of deaths that were reported there (even though the survey was completed before the widely reported assault on the city in November 2004). Roberts wrote, in a letter to the Independent, "Please understand how extremely conservative we were: we did a survey estimating that 285,000 people have died due to the first 18 months of invasion and occupation and we reported it as at least 100,000."

The dilemma he faced was this: in the 33 clusters surveyed, 18 reported no violent deaths (including one in Sadr City), 14 other clusters reported a total of 21 violent deaths and the Fallujah cluster reported 52 violent deaths. This last number is conservative because, as the report stated, "23 households of 52 visited were either temporarily or permanently abandoned. Neighbors interviewed described widespread death in most of the abandoned homes but could not give adequate details for inclusion in the survey."

Leaving aside this last factor, there were three possible interpretations of the results from Fallujah. The first, and indeed the one Roberts adopted, was that the team had randomly stumbled on a cluster of homes where the death toll was so high as to be totally unrepresentative and therefore not relevant to the survey. The second possibility was that this pattern among the 33 clusters, with most of the casualties falling in one cluster and many clusters reporting zero deaths, was an accurate representation of the distribution of civilian casualties in Iraq under "precision" aerial bombardment. The third possibility was that the Fallujah cluster was atypical, but not sufficiently abnormal to warrant total exclusion from the study, so that the number of excess deaths was somewhere between 100,000 and 285,000. Without further research, there is no way to determine which of these three possibilities is correct.

No new survey of civilians killed by "coalition" forces has been produced since the Health Ministry report last January, but there is strong evidence that the air war has intensified during this period. Independent journalists have described the continuing US assault on Ramadi as "Fallujah in slow motion." Smaller towns in Anbar province have been targets of air raids for the past several months, and towns in Diyala and Baghdad provinces have also been bombed. Seymour Hersh has covered the "under-reported" air war in the New Yorker and writes that the current US strategy is to embed US Special Forces with Iraqi forces to call in air strikes as US ground forces withdraw, opening the way for heavier bombing with even less media scrutiny (if that is possible).

One ignored feature of the survey's results is the high number of civilian casualties reported in Fallujah in August 2004. It appears that US forces took advantage of the media focus on Najaf at that time to conduct very heavy attacks against Fallujah. This is perhaps a clue to the strategy by which they have conducted much of the air war. The heaviest bombing and aerial assault at any given time is likely to be somewhere well over the horizon from any well-publicized US military operation, possibly involving only small teams of Special Forces on the ground. But cynical military strategy does not let the media off the hook for their failure to find out what is really going on and tell the outside world about it. Iraqi and other Arab journalists can still travel through most of the country and news editors should pay close attention to their reports from areas that are too dangerous for Western reporters.

A second feature of the epidemiologists' findings that has not been sufficiently explored is the one suggested above by Michael O'Toole. Since their report establishes that aerial assault and bombardment is the leading cause of violent death in Iraq and, since a direct hit by a 500 pound Mark 82 bomb will render most houses uninhabitable, any survey that disregards damaged, uninhabited houses is sure to underreport deaths. This should be taken into account by any follow-up studies.

Thanks to Roberts, his international team, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and the editorial board of the Lancet, we have a clearer picture of the violence taking place in Iraq than that presented by "mainstream" media. Allowing for 16 months of the air war and other deaths since the completion of the survey, we have to estimate that somewhere between 185,000 and 700,000 people have died as a direct result of the war. Coalition forces have killed anywhere from 70,000 to 500,000 of them, including 30,000 to 275,000 children under the age of 15.

Roberts has cautioned me to remember that whether someone is killed by a bomb, a heart attack during an air strike, or a car accident fleeing the chaos, those who initiated the war and who "stay the course" bear the responsibility.

As someone who has followed this war closely, I find the results of the study to be consistent with what I have seen gradually emerging as the war has progressed, based on the work of courageous, mostly independent reporters, and glimpses through the looking glass as more and more cracks appear in the "official story."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nicolas J.S. Davies is indebted to Medialens, a British media watchdog group, for some of the material in this report. This article was first published by Online Journal.

I don't know how you can possibly believe: "all of the evidence is against such a statement."

I'm guessing that what you think is evidence is not evidence at all. I'm guessing that what you call evidence is merely the news-opinion repeated daily by the LIEBRAL news-opinion media.

Show us my guesses are wrong or incomplete, by presenting specific excerpts from what you claim is "all of the evidence" that is allegedly against such a statement.

Here again are my previously posted excerpts from evidence that supports my statement:

Please remember, the primary and sufficient reason for invading Afghanistan was stated three times by President Bush and Congress in September 2001--

(1) The night of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the President broadcast to the nation:
www.9-11commission.gov/report/index.htm


(2) Friday, September 14, 2001 Congress passed:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/terroristattack/joint-resolution_9-14.html


(3) Thursday, September 20, 2001, President Bush addressed the nation before a joint session of Congress:
www.9-11commission.gov/report/index.htm


Please remember, the following year on Wednesday, October 16, 2002, Congress passed a joint resolution to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq and gave these two subsequently verified, primary and sufficient reasons for doing so:
www.c-span.org/resources/pdf/hjres114.pdf


The first of these two primary and sufficient reasons for invading Iraq is contained in Congress’s September 14, 2001 resolution authorizing use of "all necessary and appropriate force against those … nations or organizations … he determines … committed … the terrorist attacks … on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations … ." Consequently, the first October 16, 2002 primary and sufficient reason is contained in Congress’s September 14, 2001 resolution’s primary and sufficient reason for using all necessary and appropriate force against a nation (e.g., invading a nation).

Re: Burying The Lancet Report
emphasis added by me

"Over a year ago" = 2004.
"Previous 18 months" = July 2003 to December 2004

emphasis added by me


Who should we believe?

Maybe this will help you decide. It sure helped me decide.


I think that 98,000 estimate is way off, since the total number of annual deaths in 2003 and in 2004 was not substantially different than the total annual deaths in 2000, 2001, and 2002.

I don't know about you, but because the annual deaths in Iraq were about the same 2000 to 2004, and these were more than 20,000 deaths less than in 1999, I am going to believe the IBC project.

A minimum of 28,636 and a maximum 32,270 Iraqi civilians were killed from 1/01/2003 to 2/23/2006.

Yes, "this Iraq thing is coming apart at the seams."

Yes, the Iraqis are still "better off" now than before the invasion. Suffering now half the murder rate that they had to suffer before the invasion, is clearly being "better off."

Let's see if these "seams" start getting re-sewed by the end of June.

If these "seams" don't eventually get resewed, Western nations are going to pay a much dearer price than they have paid thus far.

BBB, thanks for the good articles.

A few chinks of light shed on Guantanamo Bay

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4771774.stm

The prisoners' names are grudgingly released. Soon we may be told the charges, and when process of law can be instigated.
But I'm not holding my breath yet.

IRAQ STATISTICS UPDATED
FROM ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Under the Geneva conventions, prisoners of war are held without trial until the end of the war and then released, unless earlier part of a prisoner trade; but their names are provided prior to the end of the war.

By the way, these prisoners of war did not comply with the Geneva conventions up to the time each one was captured.

'Marlboro Man' Turns Against War He Symbolised
By Andrew Buncombe
The Independent UK

Thursday 02 February 2006

A cigarette hung from his mouth in the manner of John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart, his grime-covered face showed the exhaustion of battle.

This image of US Marine Lance-Corporal Blake Miller, taken during the battle of Fallujah, instantly captured the public imagination and for a while he was known simply as Marlboro Man.

But 15 month after that photograph appeared in more than 100 US newspapers, the 21-year-old is back from Iraq, back on civvy street and he is talking about the trauma of what he experienced and the scars he still bears, physical and mental. The once unquestioning Marine is now also questioning whether US forces should be in Iraq.

The mental health experts who are treating him call his condition post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but Mr Miller describes it in more immediate language: nightmares, sleeplessness and periods when he will "blank out", not knowing where he is or what he is doing. "I could tell you stories about Iraq that would make the hair stand up on the back of your neck," he said. "And I could tell you things that were great over there. But that would still not tell you what it was actually like. You had to be there and go through it to really understand."

Mr Miller is not alone. The federal Veterans Affairs (VA) department revealed last week that up to a third of US troops returning from Iraq or Afghanistan - about 40,000 - suffer mental health problems. It is to spend an extra $29m (£16.3m) on troops who have PTSD. Days ago, The Independent reported the suicide of another veteran of the Iraq war, Doug Barber, a National Guardsman who took his life after struggling with his experiences of the war after he returned to civilian life.

Mr Miller, who received an honourable discharge last November after military psychologists decided he would be a threat to himself or his colleagues if he continued to serve, said there remained a stigma about mental health issues. He told Knight Ridder Newspapers: "I want people to know that PTSD is not something people come down with because they are crazy. It's an anxiety disorder, where you've experienced something so traumatic that you're close to death." Mr Miller's photograph was taken in November 2004 during the battle for Fallujah, the insurgent stronghold. The two-week operation resulted in the deaths of up to 50 US troops, an estimated 1,200 insurgents and an unknown number of civilians.

The former Marine says he now questions the US tactics and believes troops should have been withdrawn some time ago. He said: "When I was in the service my opinion was whatever the Commander-in-Chief's opinion was. But after I got out, I started to think about it. The biggest question I have now is how you can make a war on an entire country when a certain group from that country is practising terrorism against you. It's as if a gang from New York went to Iraq and blew some stuff up and Iraq started a war against us because of that."

Mr Miller's image was captured by the Los Angeles Times photographer Luis Sinco. At the time, he smoked five packs a day. Now, recently married and looking to make a fresh start, he has cut down to just one.

That question and statement needs to be edited to better match reality.

The biggest question I have now is how you can make a war on an entire country when a certain group is merely allowed sanctuary in that country and has declared its intention to practice terrorism against you? It's as if a gang were allowed sanctuary by the USA governent in New York despite Iraq's request -- and the USA's government ignoring that request -- to extradite that gang after it went to Iraq and murdered 300 of Iraq's civilians, destroyed two of its major buildings, and damaged a third, and Iraq started a war against us because of that.

In your own self-defense, that's how!

He was there, you was not, his statements do not need to edited by you to match your skewed reality.

His past location in Iraq, fighting the war in Iraq, has zero to do with whether he knows the real reason he was sent to Iraq. His mis-statement of why he was sent to Iraq is a mis-statement -- regardless of his then, now, and future locations -- because it does not match the real reason he was sent to Iraq. I have posted here the real reason repeatedly. That real reason was stated publically by the President and Congress three times, three different ways, to the American public in September 2001 after 9/11. It was stated again by Congress, a fourth time and a fourth way, to the American public in October 2002. It was the same reason stated four times four different ways!



The real reason cannot be supplemented or replaced by foolish or fraudulent mis-statements of the real reason by anyone, not even if it's subsequently mis-stated by the President of the USA after he has previously stated the real reason.

This statement of yours, revel, is an excellent and simple example of your skewed logic, which I guess to be the cause of your "skewed reality."

No matter how many times you accuse those you disagree with of behaving wrongly, you appear incapable of examining the real possibility that your own claim to rightness is what is wrong.

You are not alone in making yourself appear to be an unquestioning ward of the LIAbral news-opinion media no matter how often and how ridiculously they contradict themselves.

You are wrong to do that, revel. It's long past time for you to examine why you choose to believe what you choose to believe.

Are you afraid to question your own claims? Regardless, it's time for you to get on with it and start to examine your own fallibility.

You know who Icann711mn reminds me of?:



That's Baghdad Ali, the true believer, the proclaimer of things so certain to himself, the pronouncer of thinly sliced figments of evidence wrapped around a sense of reality that could only be described as out of whack, which rhymes with Iraq.

And now Icann711nm flies in (he's a pilot, don't you know.) to edit the words of a warrior with his little song and dance about harboring ad nauseum.
Methinks he has been leaving the window of his aircraft cracked open a bit at high altitude. Oxygen deprivation can do strange things to a thought process.

This is the face of your war, Ican711nm. Look deep into those eyes and tell him whether he deserves your respect.



Joe(get a grip)Nation

Blair's God comments anger families of Iraq casualties
By Martin Hodgson
Published: 05 March 2006
Relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq attacked Tony Blair last night over his comments that God will be the ultimate judge of the Iraq war.

Reg Keys, the father of one of six military policemen killed in June 2003, said the Prime Minister's words were "abhorrent". Mr Keys, who founded the campaigning group Military Families Against the War, said: "He is using God as a get-out for total strategic failure."

In an interview with Michael Parkinson, Mr Blair said he struggled with his conscience before sending troops in: "That decision has to be taken ... and in the end there is a judgement that - well, I think if you have faith about these things then you realise that judgement is made by other people."

When asked what he meant, Mr Blair replied: "If you believe in God, it's made by God as well."

Mr Keys, who in last year's general election stood as an anti-war candidate in Mr Blair's constituency, said: "Are we seeing over 100 coffins coming back because God told him to go to war? The first judgement should be from the bereaved families, not God."

Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon was killed in Basra in 2004, said she was "disgusted" by Mr Blair's remarks. She added: "A Christian would never put people out there to be killed."

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article349323.ece

Prisoners of crap. Some of them were kidnapped by others and sold to the Americans. There are no charges, and we do not know what evidence exists against them. There is a major documentary on TV here about this, for broadcast this week. I doubt it'll get an airing in the USA.

Is there some particular relevance in your mention of Geneva Conventions relating to the treatment of prisoners of war? The Geneva Conventions do not allow torture and murder of prisoners, either, but your Mr Rumsfeld apparently cares little about that.