BUSH AND BLAIR BONESMEN IN WAR CRIMES: September 2011

Source: Neon Tommy - Alternet
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was stripped of immunity in a case involving the torture of two United States citizens.

Two FBI informants, Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, were detained and tortured by United States military personnel in Iraq in 2006. They filed suit against Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for violations of their constitutional rights. The Judicial View states:

“Plaintiffs seek damages from Secretary Rumsfeld and others for their roles in creating and carrying out policies that caused plaintiffs’ alleged torture. Plaintiffs also bring a claim against the United States under the Administrative Procedure Act to recover personal property that was seized when they were detained.”

Rumsfeld and the United States government moved to dismiss the charges, and were denied. The plaintiffs relayed “in sufficient detail facts supporting Secretary Rumsfeld’s personal responsibility for the alleged torture.”
Read Full Article Here...

http://bit.ly/mUqpIi

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

322 : Skull and Bone..

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Open letter to Tony Blair.

Dear Tony,

I read with interest your interview with Progress yesterday, celebrating 15 years of the organisation.

My mind drifted into reverie…

No Labour supporter will forget the joy of May 1997. The dark age of Conservativism was over. As the sun rose over Festival Hall we felt anything was possible.

Of course, in those days you brought your new financial friends to the party. Nice people really. Want to spend? No problem, here’s some money, and don’t worry about how it will be paid back. Why get a 90% mortgage when you can have a 100% mortgage. Have you tried 110%? They were all smiles and pats on the back.

The record investment in Education and Health was fantastic, and thank you for that.

Did you hear about the financial crisis Tony?

It turns out the system that fuelled this spending was run by a bunch of spivs. The financial schemes in reality turned out to be no better than pyramid schemes, and were dodgy investments and smoke and mirrors. Those chaps who handed the easy money out left the scene sharpish, to be replaced by their heavies, the Austerity Brothers. Not nice people at all…you should see what they are doing to the folks of Greece and Ireland. Thugs, 100%.

You cannot be oblivious to the fact the your Labour family did not like your choice of friends. That George bloke in the US…you know the one, he wore cowboy hat and had a missionary zeal to upset the whole world. You changed Tony. You spent too many nights away from home. We’d stay up, wondering where you were, and we’d just get a brief message that you are staying out with George in some foreign country again. Your home life slipped. You choice of friends meant that you ignored your nearest and dearest.

Your Labour family suffered too because you and Gordon just wouldn’t get on. You were blood brothers early on, yet while domestically things were falling around your ears at home, all you two did is fight. Together you could have invincible. Where did it go wrong?

When you did hang your boots up, Gordon was then head of the family. Sadly the damage was done, and in 2010 the chickens came home to roost. Yet it seems that you think that if Gordon had been more like you, everything would have been rosy.

Sorry Tony, but from 2005 Labour was devoid of ideas, lost touch with the Electorate and had rotten foundations. It’s primary preoccupation was hanging on to power, but without a reason for having the power.

I would like to thank you for all the good stuff – public service investment, sure start, the minimum wage and so on.

You need to move on. Gordon has managed it. It is now for a new generation to take Labour forward. Please, no more comments or books. Retire gracefully. I understand you have just purchased a modest house. Enjoy it.

Don’t forget, the best know when to leave the stage, and it’s your turn now.

All the best,Garry

http://think-left.org/2011/09/10/an-open-letter-to-tony-blair/

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

#Iraq : #Wikileaks reveals murder of Iraqi children by US troops

http://bit.ly/om2qoA

Monday, September 5, 2011

#Israel warn of regional war and use of WMD...

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4118220,00.html

#IRAQ:#Blair and Alastair Campbell TRAITORS.

The exhausted secret intelligence officer was heading home after a heavy session analysing reports from Iraq. As he stepped out through the high-security air-lock exit from MI6’s grand headquarters beside the Thames in London, a newspaper-seller’s placard caught his eye — ‘45 minutes from attack,’ it proclaimed.

Alarm bells rang in his head. It was September 2002, and Prime Minister Tony Blair had that day unveiled with great fanfare the government’s dossier detailing Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, as a justification for going to war.

He knew, in a way the public did not, the precise background to that headline. His first thought was that this was not what the original intelligence report had said. ‘If this goes wrong, we’re all screwed,’ he muttered to himself.

Mopping up: British soldier prepares to jump from a burning tank which was set ablaze in Basra

It did go wrong, spectacularly so, as a new history of MI6 by the BBC’s well-informed security correspondent Gordon Corera recounts. It’s a disturbing story of how tiny sparks of dubious information picked up in the backstreets of Baghdad and elsewhere were fanned into giant flames.

The result was a firecracker of a dossier which was pivotal in the run-up to the deeply divisive British and American invasion of Iraq. For many people, the scary information it disclosed — that Saddam was so advanced with his chemical and biological weapons that he could fire them with a mere 45 minutes notice — was a tipping point.

More...

Millions who had been sceptical about the reality of the Iraq threat were brought up short by the Prime Minister’s assurance that the evidence of Saddam’s evil intentions was ‘extensive, detailed and authoritative’. The case for confronting him was cut and dried.

Only later would it emerge how dodgy that dossier actually was.

Victim: David Kelly, 59, after giving evidence in a Commons Select committee

Yet disastrous consequences flowed from its false and exaggerated claims. They were cited as a pretext for the conquest of Iraq, which led to tens of thousands of deaths.

They also caused a damaging clash between the government and the BBC over suggestions that the dossier had been ‘sexed-up’ and the mysterious death of a respected weapons inspector, Dr David Kelly.

For MI6, the dossier brought the biggest crisis of confidence since the infamous Cambridge spy ring and the defection of one of its top men, Kim Philby, to the Soviet Union in 1963.

What happened was a lesson in the distortion that can arise when the painstaking craft of intelligence-gathering — MI6’s pride and joy since its inception in 1909 — was over-ridden by the wishful thinking and unrelenting ambition of politicians.

From the start, Blair had put his weight and his reputation behind U.S. plans to topple Saddam, believing in his heart that the world would be a better place without the Iraqi dictator. But selling a war to a sceptical public would be very difficult. Regime change on its own was not accepted in Britain in the way it was in post-9/11 America.

So the decision was taken to base the case for war entirely on Iraq’s possession of chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. This meant leaning heavily on intelligence. From his spymasters Blair sought material to make a public case for armed intervention.

OBLIGING: MI6 at Vauxhall Bridge, were supposed to be the nation's eyes and ears, but failed to smell something fishy

They, in turn, were eager to oblige. MI6 was still in shock from having missed signs of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and Washington and was determined never to be caught out again.

There was a more deep-seated reason too. ‘One of the cultural weaknesses of MI6 is that it is too eager to please,’ one former senior official told Corera. For all the secret service’s James Bond-ish bravado, it has always been beset by a fear that one day it will no longer be needed.

Trauma: After the events of September 11, 2001, MI6 was concerned not to be caught out

The ending of the Cold War and MI6’s legendary cat-and-mouse tussles with the KGB seemed to herald that redundancy. Then the post-9/11 era offered a new mission.

Out to prove it still had a vital use in the modern world, MI6 set to work.

Early drafts were begun of a dossier on Saddam’s weapons programmes.

Some MI6 officers were unhappy with the idea of working to so precise an agenda. ‘All our training, all our culture, bias, is against such a thing,’ one complained.

But there was no stopping what quickly became a juggernaut as Britain’s two most senior spies — Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, and John Scarlett, chairman of the government’s Joint Intelligence Committee, whose job was to sift and assess MI6’s information — became central to the build-up to war.

Dearlove in particular became one of the Prime Minister’s closest advisers and, according to officials, enjoyed a ‘privileged relationship’. Blair was open about his reliance on him to provide the central plank of the argument for intervening in Iraq. At one point he turned to his spy chief and said: ‘Richard, my fate is in your hands.’

Meanwhile, Scarlett was working closely with Downing Street, to the extent that Alastair Campbell, Blair’s all-powerful media director, would talk of him as a ‘mate’ and ‘a very good bloke’.

The JIC’s brief was to make its dossier suitable for publication to the public, in itself an unprecedented step in the publicity-shy world of spies. Campbell called for it to be ‘revelatory’. As the drafting process continued, Scarlett attended meetings chaired by Campbell to look at the presentation.

Target: Saddam Hussein's Iraq was viewed with suspicion by the West after the invasion of Kuwait and the First Gulf War

Intelligence was being sucked closer to policy than it had ever been before in MI6’s history.

Scarlett disputes this, maintaining that he was just putting information in the public domain not taking sides. Subordinates disagree.

‘We knew the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war,’ one senior military intelligence officer later complained. ‘Every fact was managed to make it as strong as possible.’

Direction and pressure were being applied on the JIC and its drafters, he maintained. A line had been crossed. Intelligence was being used as a tool for political persuasion.

But what intelligence was there to gather? Not a lot, in reality.

Going to war: British airmen from 51 Squadron RAF Regiment shelter from the dust thrown up from a helicopter in 2009 in Basra, Iraq, after an invasion in 2003 that was supposed to bring peace and stability

Iraq had long been a backwater for MI6, with information about it, on the spy masters’ own admission, ‘sporadic and patchy’.

Then, suddenly, in the wake of 9/11, it was rocketed into top priority. All the dirt on Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction was required as a matter of urgency.

The problem was that it takes years to build up reliable intelligence sources. Potential agents have to be spotted, researched, cultivated, approached and their veracity and good faith validated.

But that was not the time-frame on offer. Though MI6 had a small stable of agents reporting from within Iraq, one or two long-standing and reliable, none of them had any ﬁrst-hand knowledge of the WMD programme.

Terror: A resident runs from the site of a bomb attack as fire engulfs vehicles in central Baghdad in 2009

But, knowing exactly what MI6 was looking for — and with cash bonuses on offer — they managed to find it by recruiting (or claiming to recruit) sub-sources with what was little more than gossip to spill and the product of their own imaginations.

What the handful of agents didn’t report on — because they knew it was not wanted — was the large number of people they met in Iraq who knew nothing about special weapons and doubted their existence.

Herein lay another problem. Saddam was clever and cunning, a master of deception. So MI6 decided they would have to deal with him in the same double-bluff and double-cross way they had treated the Soviet Union during the great espionage and counter-espionage days of the Cold War.

This has an inherent difficulty. If you are convinced that your enemy is practising deception, and you can’t ﬁnd what you are looking for, the logic — which, of course, is utterly flawed — is that your opponent is simply very good at deceiving you.

Absence of evidence, as U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it, was not evidence of absence. It was a doctrine that was about to implode over Saddam’s non-existent WMDs.

Any claims he now made that he had destroyed his chemical and biological weapons and halted his nuclear programme were simply dismissed in Washington and London as disinformation. Because Saddam had lied and cheated in the past, the overwhelming view was that he was doing the same now.

As things stood, though, the dossier proving that he still had WMDs was still looking thin.

Horror: The site of a car bomb explosion in Baghdad's al-Sadriyah district,in April 2007 in which 21 people were killed and 71 others wounded

Much of the ‘crucial’ material came from Iraqi defectors who pimped stories to the Western intelligence agencies, making wild assertions in return for asylum. One such ‘fabricator’, codenamed Curveball, was set up with a new life in Germany after making up information about biological weapons being manufactured on mobile trailers.

But in the climate of the times no one wanted to have a major source knocked out from under them. Curveball’s reports became the main evidence for Britain’s case that Saddam was still producing biological weapons.

War crime: US Army Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr. posing next to a detainee who died during interrogation in late 2003 at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Iraq

Even so, as time marched on and deadlines approached, the JIC and Downing Street were increasingly desperate for something more concrete to still the nation’s doubts about war. Emails whizzed back and forth, pleading for more information to put into the dossier. ‘Has anybody got anything more they can put in it?’ was the constant cry.

Then, with a flourish, the magicians at MI6 pulled a rabbit or three out of their hat. They produced new intelligence, in the nick of time, that seemed to save the day.

From Baghdad, a long-serving agent had sent an encrypted message over a tiny transmitter. One of his sources had produced a rather vague and ambiguous report saying that biological and chemical munitions could be with military units and ready to fire within 20 to 45 minutes. Quite what the weapons were he could not say.

The source was untested but his identity was known, and he seemed to be in a position to know the information. The will for him to be right outweighed caution.

Not everyone was convinced. Some at the JIC thought MI6’s description of its new sub-source too vague. It was also unclear what sort of weapons he was referring to.

If the 45 minutes related to battlefield shells, as the JIC assessment staff believed, then it was not particularly surprising. In fact it was pretty pathetic rather than scary if it took the Iraqi army 45 minutes to ﬁre a shell. But if it was referring to a ballistic missile, it was unrealistic to the point that it should be ignored.

Prisoners: Iraqi detainees mill about and others pray at the Camp Cropper detention centre in Baghdad, Iraq. In 2007 US forces held a total of some 25,000 detainees

Basically, what the source had provided was what Corera describes as ‘just a lonely piece of intelligence ﬂoating in a sea of uncertainty, to which those who wanted to could cling’. It was more local colour than hard intelligence, but the spooks grabbed at it gratefully.

Then, out of the blue, another piece of intelligence dropped. MI6 had apparently bagged an important new agent, who claimed that Iraq’s production of biological and chemical weapons was being accelerated and new facilities built.

The source was untested but Dearlove and senior officers around him were bullish. This was crucial in hardening up judgments and overcoming doubts. The reports were passed straight to Downing Street, bypassing assessors who could judge its technical credibility.

Convinced: Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair speaking at an inquiry into Britain's role in the Iraq War

Some inside MI6 believed this was emblematic of what had gone wrong. Too much unproven intelligence, hot off the printer, was rushed into the welcoming arms of No 10.

‘Everything was supposed to go through the assessment staff,’ one officer recalled, talking about intelligence reports in general, ‘but often we got it half an hour after it had gone to Downing Street, with it post-dated to cover their backs.’

But confidence was high. The new source promised another consignment of crucial intelligence soon, including details of WMD sites. This, it was hoped, might be Blair’s eagerly sought ‘silver bullet’.

The dossier, now stiffened by the new sources, was ready for the outside world. In a foreword, Blair wrote that Saddam’s continuing production of WMDs was ‘established beyond doubt’.

Any hint that there were limits to the intelligence and even major gaps had been lost, along with many other caveats.

Armed with MI6’s dossier, weapons inspectors for the United Nations — which still hoped to forestall war — now went back to Iraq to hunt once again for WMD. They inspected 300 sites and found nothing. ‘We went to a lot of chicken farms,’ one said,’ but there were just chickens’.

The response in London was that this proved only how devious and duplicitous Saddam was and how incompetent and naive the inspectors were. In any case, proof of WMDs was largely irrelevant now. Nothing was going to stop the momentum.

Murdered: British hostage Kenneth Bigley on a video tape in which he made a plea to Prime Minister Tony Blair to work for his release from captivity by Iraqi militants

When hard intelligence of Saddam’s preparedness or otherwise for war suggested Iraq did not have usable weapons able to attack at all, let alone in 45 minutes, this was never revealed to the British public.

‘The books had been cooked, the bets placed,’ as an American intelligence officer put it. The conquest of Iraq began.

In no time, Saddam’s forces were caving in, and it seemed odd that with Coalition troops approaching Baghdad, he did not use any of his ‘special weapons’. When it was all over, the issue resurfaced.

Site after site was searched for evidence of WMDs. None was found.

Linchpin: Tony Blair's former spin doctor Alastair Campbell played a major part in preparing the argument to involve Britain in Iraq

One by one MI6’s prized sources melted away like mirages in the desert heat. Three months after the fall of Baghdad, MI6 interviewed in person the cherished new source in whom so much had been invested and who had dispelled so many doubts.

He denied ever having said anything about accelerated production of biological and chemical weapons.

The military officer who had passed on the 45-minute claim also denied having ever said such a thing, and it became clear that he had made it all up. So too had ‘Curveball’.

The impact on MI6’s reputation was calamitous. The use of intelligence to sell a war to the public might not have mattered much if it turned out to be true.

But once it was proved to be wrong, it left the public, and especially those who had been persuaded by the intelligence, feeling bitter.

The recriminations began. Who was to blame for this fiasco, which had justified a war on a false premise? Who was responsible for launching Britain’s very own WMD, a weapon of mass deception?

MI6 over-promised and under-delivered, was the verdict of one JIC member. This is disputed by some at MI6, who maintain that they
always made clear the intelligence was scant.

Others argue that they had been left exposed by the politicians. The decision to go to war was a political choice by a prime minister who settled on intelligence as the best means by which to sell it to Parliament and the public. When it didn’t materialise: ‘We got dumped on.’

Many inside MI6 believed their organisation should take it squarely on the chin. Their sources had been wrong, and that was an end of it.

The politicians may have pushed and pressed and spun the intelligence, but ultimately, the problem was that MI6’s reporting was dud.

But others thought it was their own leadership who had let them down and left them exposed by getting too close to power.

Scarlett and his committee were accused of making a dreadful error in entering Blair’s ‘magic circle’. They had allowed themselves to be engulfed by the heady atmosphere and failed to keep their distance and objectivity.

The same criticism was made of Dearlove, who was said to have relished being at the epicentre of power, having informal meetings with Blair and even brieﬁng Bush in the Oval Office. The truth — as we can now see nearly a decade later — is that politicians and spies became far too close in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Corera is clear that, if the spooks and politicos must sup with each other, then it is better for all of us that in future they do so with a very long spoon.

THE ART OF BETRAYAL by Gordon Corera is published this week by Weidenfeld & Nicolson @ £20. To order a copy for £17.99 (incl p&p) call 0843 382 0000.

#Iraq #Murdoch #Blair' SOME DAY, AND THAT DAY MAY NEVER COME...' Rupert Murdoch tried to shape Iraq war agenda.

'SOME DAY, AND THAT DAY MAY NEVER COME...' Rupert Murdoch tried to shape Iraq war agenda. 44 secs in. #blair #godfather

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/index.php/iraq/621-rupert-murdoch-gotcha

Sunday, September 4, 2011

9/ll INSIDE JOB !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLsQkjFX6Hk

The 9/11 USAF Stand Down ...What REALLY happened.

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/911stand.html

After 9/11 you no longer have rights.

After 9/11: Plane Flying into World Trade Center

Photograph: Rob Howard/Corbis

Adama Bah, 23, student

Illustrations: Julien Lallemand

My mother came to the United States with me in 1990, the year I turned two. We originally came from Koubia in Guinea, west Africa. My dad was here already, living in Brooklyn. Then came my brother, who is now 19, my sister, who is 17, and two more brothers who are 13 and five. I'm 23. We lived in an apartment in Manhattan.

I went to public school until seventh grade. Then my dad wanted me to learn about my religion, so he sent me to an Islamic boarding school in Buffalo, New York. What's weird now that I look back is that my parents aren't really religious, we didn't really go to mosque. But my dad heard about the school from somebody who recommended it.

I was 13 when 9/11 happened. My teacher announced that a Muslim might have done it, and that there might be hatred against Muslims. I felt 9/11 when I came back to New York for Ramadan break. Altogether, there were six classmates who had to get on a plane to come back. At that time, we covered our faces. I couldn't believe the looks. Everybody was scared, pointing. We got extra screenings, our bags were checked, we got pulled to the side. I've never had racism directed toward me before.

My parents didn't know I wore the niqab until I came home. My mom opened the door, saw me, and told my father, "You have to tell her to take this off."

I came back to New York public school for ninth grade. I left the Islamic school because I didn't like it. I remember telling my dad, "I'm too controlled there." I wore my niqab for a few months. I didn't have any problems in high school, but after a while, I thought, "This is not a mosque." So in the middle of ninth grade, I took it off.... read more

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/02/after-9-11-muslim-arab-american-stories

Saturday, September 3, 2011

9/11: #Rumslfeld had foreknowledge of #Pentagon attack.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_gVGW86QC8&feature=youtu.be

#IRAQ :Frank #Luntz politicians' how-to-guide' on selling the Iraq war to the public. Chilling stuff...

http://t.co/Yf0pFaF

Thursday, September 1, 2011

9/11 UNITED we Investigate.

http://911unitedweinvestigate.blogspot.com/

#Wikileaks #Iraqi children shot in the head in US raid.

A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.

The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks' website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.

But Philip Alston, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a communication to American officials dated 12 days after the March 15, 2006, incident that autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Among the dead were four women and five children. The children were all 5 years old or younger.

Reached by email Wednesday, Alston said that as of 2010 — the most recent data he had — U.S. officials hadn't responded to his request for information and that Iraq's government also hadn't been forthcoming. He said the lack of response from the United States "was the case with most of the letters to the U.S. in the 2006-2007 period," when fighting in Iraq peaked.

Alston said he could provide no further information on the incident. "The tragedy," he said, "is that this elaborate system of communications is in place but the (U.N.) Human Rights Council does nothing to follow up when states ignore issues raised with them."

The Pentagon didn't respond to a request for comment. At the time, American military officials in Iraq said the accounts of townspeople who witnessed the events were highly unlikely to be true, and they later said the incident didn't warrant further investigation. Military officials also refused to reveal which units might have been involved in the incident.

Iraq was fast descending into chaos in early 2006. An explosion that ripped through the Golden Dome Mosque that February had set off an orgy of violence between rival Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and Sunni insurgents, many aligned with al Qaida in Iraq, controlled large tracts of the countryside.

Ishaqi, about 80 miles northwest of Baghdad, not far from Saddam Hussein's hometown, Tikrit, was considered so dangerous at the time that U.S. military officials had classified all roads in the area as "black," meaning they were likely to be booby-trapped with roadside bombs.

The Ishaqi incident was unusual because it was brought to the world's attention by the Joint Coordination Center in Tikrit, a regional security center set up with American military assistance and staffed by U.S.-trained Iraqi police officers.

The original incident report was signed by an Iraqi police colonel and made even more noteworthy because U.S.-trained Iraqi police, including Brig. Gen. Issa al Juboori, who led the coordination center, were willing to speak about the investigation on the record even though it was critical of American forces.

Throughout the early investigation, U.S. military spokesmen said that an al Qaida in Iraq suspect had been seized from a first-floor room after a fierce fight that had left the house he was hiding in a pile of rubble.

But the diplomatic cable provides a different sequence of events and lends credence to townspeople's claims that American forces destroyed the house after its residents had been shot.

Alston initially posed his questions to the U.S. Embassy in Geneva, which passed them to Washington in the cable.

According to Alston's version of events, American troops approached a house in Ishaqi, which Alston refers to as "Al-Iss Haqi," that belonged to Faiz Harrat Al-Majma'ee, whom Alston identified as a farmer. The U.S. troops were met with gunfire, Alston said, that lasted about 25 minutes.

After the firefight ended, Alston wrote, the "troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them. After the initial MNF intervention, a U.S. air raid ensued that destroyed the house." The initials refer to the official name of the military coalition, the Multi-National Force.

Alston said "Iraqi TV stations broadcast from the scene and showed bodies of the victims (i.e. five children and four women) in the morgue of Tikrit.

Autopsies carries (sic) out at the Tikrit Hospital's morgue revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed."

The cable makes no mention any of the alleged shooting suspects being found or arrested at or near the house.

The cable closely tracks what neighbors told reporters for Knight Ridder at the time. (McClatchy purchased Knight Ridder in spring 2006.) Those neighbors said the U.S. troops had approached the house at 2:30 a.m. and a firefight ensued. In addition to exchanging gunfire with someone in the house, the American troops were supported by helicopter gunships, which fired on the house.

The cable also backs the original report from the Joint Coordination Center, which said U.S. forces entered the house while it was still standing. That first report noted: "The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 persons, including five children, four women and two men.

Then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals."

The report was signed by Col. Fadhil Muhammed Khalaf, who was described in the document as the assistant chief of the Joint Coordination Center.

The cable also backs up the claims of the doctor who performed the autopsies, who told Knight Ridder "that all the victims had bullet shots in the head and all bodies were handcuffed."

The cable notes that "at least 10 persons, namely Mr. Faiz Hratt Khalaf, (aged 28), his wife Sumay'ya Abdul Razzaq Khuther (aged 24), their three children Hawra'a (aged 5) Aisha (aged 3) and Husam (5 months old), Faiz's mother Ms. Turkiya Majeed Ali (aged 74), Faiz's sister (name unknown), Faiz's nieces Asma'a Yousif Ma'arouf (aged 5 years old), and Usama Yousif Ma'arouf (aged 3 years), and a visiting relative Ms. Iqtisad Hameed Mehdi (aged 23) were killed during the raid."

(Schofield, an editorial writer at The Kansas City Star, was Berlin bureau chief and was on temporary assignment in Iraq at the time of the Ishaqi incident.)

BUSH AND BLAIR BONESMEN IN WAR CRIMES

Thursday, September 29, 2011

#Vancouver :#IRAQ : Dick Cheney ARREST HIM !

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/americas/dick-cheney-unapologetic-defies-vancouver-protesters/article2181194/

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

#IRAQ: Donald #Rumsfeld Stripped Of Immunity In Torture Case