News Intelligence Analysis
The Iraq War
Directory of Prisoner Abuse Articles.
Directory: Abu Ghraib Reports and Articles on Prisoner Abuse
See also Law and Legal Issues
NEW: Target Iran:
US Able to Strike in
the Spring
Ewen MacAskill in Washington
US preparations for an air strike against Iran are
at an advanced stage, in spite of repeated public
denials by the Bush administration, according to
informed sources in Washington. The present military
build-up in the Gulf would allow the US to mount an
attack by the spring. But the sources said that if there
was an attack, it was more likely next year, just before
Mr Bush leaves
office.
Steven L. Jordan, Abu Ghraib Officer
Faces Court-Martial
The only U.S. military officer
charged with a crime in
the Abu Ghraib scandal will be court-martialed on
eight charges, including cruelty and maltreatment
of prisoners, the
Army said Friday.
Lockheed Stock and
Two Smoking Barrels
by Richard Cummings
If you think the Iraq War hasn't
worked out
well for anyone, think again. Defense contractors
such as Lockheed are thriving. And no wonder:
here's the story of how Lockheed's interests--as
opposed to those of the American citizenry--set
the course of U.S.
policy after 9/11.
Audit Finds U.S. Hid
Cost
of Iraq Projects
By JAMES GLANZ
July 30, 2006
The State Department agency in charge of $1.4 billion
in reconstruction money in Iraq used an accounting
shell game to hide ballooning cost overruns on its
projects there and knowingly withheld information on
schedule delays from Congress, a federal audit
released late
Friday has found.
Pentagon Study Links Fatalities to
Body Armor
January 7, 2006
By MICHAEL MOSS
A secret Pentagon study has found that as many
as 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in
Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived
if they had had extra body armor. Such armor has been
available since 2003, but until recently the Pentagon has
largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from
the field for additional protection, according
to military officials.
Up in the Air: Where Is the Iraq
War Headed Next?
By Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker
05 December 2005 Issue
In recent weeks, there has been
widespread
speculation that President George W. Bush,
confronted by diminishing approval ratings and
dissent within his own party, will begin pulling
American
troops out of Iraq next year.
U.S. Should Repay Millions to Iraq,
a U.N. Audit Finds
By JAMES GLANZ
November 5, 2005
An auditing board sponsored by the United Nations
recommended yesterday that the United States
repay as much as $208 million to the Iraqi government
for contracting work in 2003 and 2004 assigned to
Kellogg, Brown & Root, the
Halliburton subsidiary.
Sandstorm In Iraq
by Peggy Gish
8 August, 2005
We wake up to the dull orange
sky hanging
thickly all around the earth, dimming the sun.
Every breath we take is one full of dust. Buildings
across the street are hidden in the haze. During the night,
a dust storm has rolled
into Baghdad.
Bush's Iraq Speech Fails on All Counts
By Gerald Rellick
July 2005
George Bush had a bad week. He
gave a major
speech on Tuesday in an effort to bolster support for
the war in Iraq, but by week’s end, judging from a
number of indicators, he
clearly failed in this effort.
Iraqi Constitution Draft Includes
Curbs to Women's Rights
By EDWARD WONG
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 19 - A working draft of Iraq's
new constitution would cede a strong role to Islamic
law and could sharply curb women's rights, particularly
in personal matters like divorce and
family inheritance.
Iraqi Civilian Deaths Increase
Dramatically After Invasion
Civilian deaths have risen dramatically
in
Iraq since the country was invaded in March
2003, according to a survey conducted by
researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg
School of Public Health, Columbia University
School of Nursing and Al-Mustansiriya University
in Baghdad. The researchers found that the majority
of deaths were attributed to violence, which were
primarily the result of military actions by Coalition forces.
Most of those killed by
Coalition forces were
women and children.
Lancet: "100,000 Civilians Dead
Since
Iraq invasion"
New research published
in the respected London
medical journal "The Lancet" indicates that the
civilian death toll in Iraq is around 10 times
higher than previously thought.
by Richard Horton, Monday November
01, 2004
Pentagon Intends to Replace
Ground Commander in Iraq
Departure is unrelated to
abuse scandal,
officials say. Ex-chief of prison is suspended.
By John Hendren and Richard
A. Serrano
Further, the Red Cross determined
that detainees
were subjected to "physical or psychological coercion
during interrogations" by U.S. intelligence officials...
contrary
to what Defense Department officials have
said, that some detainees were not entitled to the
full protections of the Geneva Convention because
the prison was under fire from insurgents and there
was a desperate need for information
from detainees.
Indignation Grows in US over British
Prewar Documents
By John Daniszewski
Thursday 12 May 2005
Critics of Bush call them proof
that he and Blair never saw
diplomacy as an option with Hussein. London - Reports in
the British press this month based on documents indicating
that President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair had
conditionally agreed by July 2002 to invade Iraq appear to
have blown
over quickly in Britain.
Proof Bush Fixed The Facts
Ray McGovern
May 04, 2005
"Intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy."
Never in our wildest dreams did
we think we would see
those words in black and white—and beneath a SECRET
stamp, no less. For three years now, we in Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been saying that the
CIA and its British counterpart, MI-6, were ordered by their
countries' leaders to "fix facts" to "justify"
an unprovoked
war on Iraq. More often than not, we
have been greeted
with stares of incredulity.
May 01, 2005
The Secret Downing Street
Memo
DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02
cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign
Secretary, Attorney-General,
Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C,
Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell
IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY
Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister
on 23
July to discuss Iraq.
The Secret Downing
Street Memo
by Molly Ivins
AUSTIN, Texas -- I cannot let this astounding Downing
Street memo go unmentioned. On May 1, the Sunday
Times of London printed a secret memo that went to
the defense secretary, foreign secretary, attorney
general and other high officials. It is the minutes of
their meeting on Iraq with Tony Blair. The memo was
written by Matthew Rycroft, a Downing Street foreign
policy aide. It has been confirmed as legitimate and
is dated July 23, 2002. I
suppose the correct cliche
is "smoking gun."
Iraq and the Bush Administration Policies
REMARKS BY SENATOR EDWARD KENNEDY
(D-MA)
TO THE CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS
SEN. KENNEDY: Thank you. Thank
you, General Nash, for
that generous introduction. General Nash had an impressive
career in the U.S. Army. His experience, expertise in conflict
prevention and postwar reconstruction from his leadership
in the Balkans has created and greatly assisted the
debate on postwar
Iraq.
Press Reports on U.S. Casualties:
About 17,000 Short, UPI Says
U.S. Suffers 25,029 casualties
By Mark Benjamin
Published: September 15, 2004
NEW YORK (UPI) Nearly 17,000
service members
medically evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan are
absent from public Pentagon casualty reports
commonly cited by newspapers, according to
military data reviewed by United Press International.
Most don't fit the definition of casualties, according
to the Pentagon, but a veterans' advocate said they
should
all be counted.
Chalabi--is Alive
and Well and
Entrenched [Temporarily] in
Interim Government
by Marcia MacMullan
June 24, 2004
Jane Mayer's prescient article,
"The Manipulator" in
the New Yorker was published shortly before Ayad
Allawi was appointed, on U.S. orders, as the interim
Prime
Minister of Iraq.
Red Cross Was Told Iraq Abuse
'Part of the Process'
Mon May 10, 2004
By Peter Graff
LONDON - The Red Cross saw U.S. troops
keeping Iraqi prisoners naked for days in
darkness at the Abu Ghraib jail last October
and was told by an intelligence officer in
charge it was "part of the process," a report
leaked on Monday said.
Study Published by Army Criticizes
War on Terror's Scope
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 12, 2004
A scathing new report published
by the Army War
College broadly criticizes the Bush administration's
handling of the war on terrorism, accusing it of taking
a detour into an "unnecessary" war in Iraq and pursuing
an "unrealistic" quest against terrorism that may lead
to U.S. wars with states that pose no serious threat. With
links to the full War College Report.
WMD Report Slams Bush White House
Jim Lobe, Inter Press
Service
January 9, 2004
Viewed on January 13, 2004
Three leading non-proliferation
experts from
a prominent think tank charge that the
administration of U.S. President George W.
Bush "systematically misrepresented" the
threat posed by Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction.
Summary of New Carnegie Report
WMD IN IRAQ
Evidence and Implications
WMD in IRAQ: Evidence and Implications,
a
new study from the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, details what the U.S. and
international intelligence communities understood
about Iraq's weapons programs
before the war
The Torture Photos
May 5, 2004
It seems gloomily possible that
in years to come,
when people in the Middle East recall the invasion
of Iraq, they will speak not of lost American lives or
the toppling of a brutal dictator. The most enduring
image of the occupation may be those pictures of
grinning American soldiers torturing
Iraqi prisoners.
The Nightmare at Abu Ghraib
May 3, 2004
The American military made a strange and ill-starred
decision when it chose to incarcerate Iraqis in Abu Ghraib,
the prison that had become a byword for torture under
Saddam Hussein and a symbol of everything the invasion
of Iraq was supposed to end. As United States officials
have known for months, some of the American soldiers
brought their own
version of sadism to the site.
When We're the Evildoers in Iraq
Abuses by the U.S. military
have left a dirty
stain on the reputation of this nation -- another
cost of an immoral foreign policy.
By Robert Scheer
President Bush is again refusing
to take responsibility
for any of the horrors happening on his watch. This
time it is the abuse
of Iraqi prisoners
Forgery of Iraq-War-Justifying
Documents Done in the U.S.
According to a Former Top
U.S. Intelligence
Official on Los Angeles Radio Program
Los Angeles, Ca.--Vincent Cannistraro
is the former
Director of National Security Council Intelligence
under Ronald Reagan (’84-’87) and the former
Chief of Operations of the CIA’s Counterterrorism
Center, who led the investigation into the bombing
of Pan Am Flight 103. On April 3, 2005, he was
interviewed on Ian Masters' Background Briefing
radio program, which broadcasts from Los Angeles,
California on public radio. In the interview, Mr. Cannistraro
made a number of withering observations on the Bush
administration and the process failures
that led to war.
The Critical Battle for Iraq's Energy
Attacks by Saboteurs Cripple
Infrastructure
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, January 15, 2005
BAGHDAD -- The armed men waited
until at
least 10 tanker trucks were in line outside the
huge refinery in the Sunni Triangle city of Baiji,
a major source of gasoline for Iraq. Then they
made their move: Arriving in a blue Opel sedan,
their faces obscured by checkered head scarves
and wraparound sunglasses, the insurgents
charged into the road and began moving from
truck to truck.
Pundit O'Reilly Now Skeptical
About Bush
Tue Feb 10, 9:25 AM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Conservative
television
news anchor Bill O'Reilly said on Tuesday he was
now skeptical about the Bush administration and
apologized to viewers for supporting prewar claims
that Iraq had weapons
of mass destruction.
Former Iraq Arms Inspector Faults
Prewar Intelligence
By PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON, Aug. 18 - A former Bush
administration official who led the fruitless
postwar effort to find weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq told Congress on Wednesday that the
National Security Council led by Condoleezza Rice
had botched intelligence information before the war
and was "the dog that did not bark" over Iraq's
weapons program.
The Religious Warrior of Abu Ghraib
An evangelical US general
played a pivotal
role in Iraqi prison reform
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday May 20, 2004
Saving General Boykin seemed
like a strange
sideshow last October. After it was revealed
that the deputy undersecretary of defence for
intelligence had been regularly appearing at
evangelical revivals preaching that the US
was in a holy war as a "Christian nation"
battling "Satan", the
furore was quickly calmed.
Iraq Prisoners Faced 'Sadistic'
Abuses-Magazine
Sat May 1,
By Caroline Drees
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Iraqi
prisoners
faced numerous "sadistic, blatant and wanton
criminal abuses" by U.S. soldiers, including
sodomy and beatings, according to a U.S. Army
report quoted by the New Yorker magazine. The New
Yorker said it had obtained a 53-page, internal U.S.
military report into alleged abuses at the notorious
Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. In an article
posted on its Web site on Saturday, the magazine
said the report had been authorized by Lt. Gen.
Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. officer in Iraq and
was completed
in February.
Dancing Alone
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
It is time to ask this question: Do we have any chance
of succeeding at regime change in Iraq without
regime change here
at home?
A Time for Truth
by Patrick J. Buchanan
With pictures of the sadistic
sexual abuse of
Iraqis in Abu Ghraib prison still spilling out onto
the front pages, it is not too early to
draw some
conclusions.
Open Door Policy
A strange thing happened on
the way to the war.
By Karen Kwiatkowski
As the winter of 2002 approached, I was
increasingly amazed at the success of the
propaganda campaign being waged by President
Bush, Vice President Cheney, and neoconservative
mouthpieces at the Washington Times and Wall
Street Journal. I speculated about the necessity
but unlikelihood of a Phil-Dick-style minority report
on the grandiose Feith-Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Cheney
vision of some future Middle East where peace, love,
and democracy are brought about by pre-emptive war
and military
occupation
Americans Suffer More than 14,000
Casualties in Iraq
Between 14,000 and 22,000
military men
and women have been medically evacuated from Iraq
By David H. Hackworth
Tuesday, December 30, 2003 -
ALMOST daily we're
told that another American soldier has sacrificed life
or limb in Iraq. For way too many of us unless we
have a white flag with a blue star in our window these
casualty reports have become as big a yawn as a
TV forecast of
the weather in Baghdad.
Bush Names Baker Envoy on Iraqi Debt
By Mike Allen and William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, December 5, 2003
President Bush today appointed
former secretary
of state James A. Baker III to a key new post in
the U.S. effort to rebuild Iraq, announcing that the
veteran political operative and renowned troubleshooter
would become his "personal envoy on
the issue of Iraqi debt."
BAKER TAKES THE LOAF
The President's Business
Partner Slices Up Iraq
by Greg Palast
TomPaine.com
Monday, December 8, 2003
Well, ho ho ho! It's an early Christmas for James Baker III.
All year the elves at his law firm, Baker Botts of Texas,
have been working day and night to prevent the families of
the victims of the September 11 attack from seeking
information from Saudi Arabia on the Kingdom's funding
of Al Qaeda fronts.
Halliburton Chief Launches 'Defending
Our Company' Campaign
LARRY MARGASAK,
Associated Press Writer
Friday, October 24, 2003
©2003 Associated Press
The head of Vice President Dick
Cheney's former
employer, Halliburton, is asking employees to contact
newspapers and lawmakers to counter Democratic
criticism of the company's no-bid contract in Iraq.
In an Oct. 17 memo entitled "Defending Our Company,"
Halliburton's president, Dave Lesar, said he was offended
by the criticism but cautioned employees to
be
positive in their letters.
Bush Sells Indulgences
to Get Into
Purgatory, Not to Get Out
October 29, 2003
by Katherine Yurica
George W. Bush must have Harry
Potter's wand
for he's succeeded in convincing people that
Saddam Hussein was behind the September
11th attacks when he wasn't; has convinced
middle class Americans that he's only thinking
of them--when he's only thinking of the wealthy;
and has succeeded in convincing people that the
war is over and the thousands of wounded American
GIs jammed into hospitals that look like Civil War
wards--don't exist--and if they did exist, it's a reasonable
price to pay for the rebuilding of someone else's country
since more people are killed and maimed in auto
accidents in the
U.S.
Christians in Iraq
By Glen Chancy
September 15, 2003 -- Many public
services such as
water and electricity may be spotty in Iraq, but at least
mail delivery seems to be going well enough. Christian
Assyrian families all over Iraq have been receiving
versions of the following letter delivered to them
in their homes:
White House Is Ambushed By
Criticism From America's
Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
LOS ANGELES -- George Bush probably
owes
his presidency to the absentee military voters
who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past
Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the
reasons for going to war there mired in controversy,
an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the
gravest immediate threat to his political future, just
one year before
the presidential elections.
Thanks for the M.R.E.'s
by Paul Krugman
A few days ago I talked to a soldier just back from
Iraq. He'd been in a relatively calm area; his main
complaint was about food. Four months after the fall
of Baghdad, his unit was still eating the dreaded M.R.E.'s:
meals ready to eat. When Italian troops moved into the area,
their food was "way more realistic" — and American
troops
were soon trading whatever they could for
some of that
Italian food.
The National Security Strategy of the
United States of America, September 2002
The White House
A copy of the official
document. For the first time
in U.S. history, a policy of pre-emptive strikes is
justified and outlined.
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