CounterCurrents

On the 5th anniversary of the illegal, war criminal, Australian, UK and US invasion of Iraq we see an ongoing Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide - post-invasion non-violent and violent excess deaths 1.7-2.2 million, post-invasion under-5 infant deaths 0.6 million, and 4.5 million refugees out of a current population of about 28 million i.e. about one quarter of Iraqis DEAD or HOMELESS.

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Smoking Mirrors

Today is March 19th. We celebrate five years of bloody war and torture based on lies. These lies came from Michael Ledeen and various neo-con insurgents like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearle, Douglas Feith and Dick Cheney, operating in the United States government at various agencies. Well… the Afghan war began on October 7th, 2001 and that was also based on a lie so actually we have had around 6.5 years of bloody war and torture.

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AP photo / Dusan Vranic

Xymphora

Useful but fundamentally flawed article from the American Conservative by Robert Bryce on the amount of oil being used by the American military in killing the innocent civilians of Iraq, and the fact that almost none of it is coming from Iraq. We all remember how the neocons insisted that all that Iraqi oil was going to pay for the war and the occupation and the rebuilding (for the real world, see here and, taking into account the unreliable source, here).

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Znet

Apparently there is one set of rights for Blackwater mercenaries and another for the rest of us. Normally when a group of people alleged to have gunned down 17 civilians in a lawless shooting spree are questioned, investigators will tell them something along the lines of: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” But that is not what the Blackwater operatives involved in the September 16 Nisour Square shooting in Iraq were told. Most of the Blackwater shooters were questioned by State Department Diplomatic Security investigators with the understanding that their statements and information gleaned from them could not be used to bring criminal charges against them, nor could they be introduced as evidence. In other words, “Anything you say can’t and won’t be used against you in a court of law.”

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Baghdad: walls, wire and greetings from the occupiers

Lagauche Is Right

When I saw the first photos of Baghdad being bombed during the "shock and awe" phase of the illegal 2003 attack against Iraq, I was saddened. For millennia, the city had endured wars, occupations, plundering, natural disasters, and liberations. This time, however, it was different. I knew Baghdad would be changed in a despicable way that would take decades of recovery to become the city it once was.

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Mordechai Vanunu in 2004. Photograph: Sean Smith

Crescent & Cross

A Plea For Mordechai Vanunu

As some of you may know, yesterday, March17 I had the extreme honor of interviewing on the Republic Broadcasting Network Mordechai Vanunu, Christian convert from Judaism who spent nearly 20 years in the hellhole of an Israeli prison for revealing the Jewish state's nuclear weapons program. Not accustomed to patting myself on the back, nevertheless I can say unequivocally that the 2 hour program was phenomenal, 99% of the kudos going to Vanunu himself whom I credit with being a modern day apostle.

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