Julian Assange on Larry King Live, telling it like it is.
Category: Iraq
John Mearsheimer on WikiLeaks Iraq logs
John Mearsheimer debates the WikiLeaks war logs with Patrick Mansoor, a former Petraeus aide.
JOHN MEARSHEIMER, University of Chicago:
[I]t does make it very clear how horrible the violence has been in Iraq since we invaded in 2003. And it also is quite clear from the documents that the United States has played an important role in making that violence happen.Not only do the documents show that American soldiers and airmen have killed large numbers of civilians. It’s also clear that we didn’t do much at all to stop the Iraqis from torturing and murdering prisoners. This was a huge mistake on our part. […]
The Secret Iraq Files
UPDATE: See part II of Al Jazeera’s Secret Iraq Files below. Also see Part 1 and Part 2 of Democracy Now‘s interview with Julian Assange, and Daniel Ellsberg on why he supports Wikileaks.
The Wikileaks war logs present irrefutable evidence of the murder, torture and rape which has been occuring for the past seven years in Iraq. However, it is not clear why it has chosen to collaborate with the dubious Iraq Body Count which for years has been providing a convenient underestimate of Iraqi casualties to war supporters.
The Iraq War Logs: Torture and Complicity
It is the largest classified military leak in history. Released by WikiLeaks, the 391,832 reports (‘The Iraq War Logs‘) document the war and occupation in Iraq, from 1st January 2004 to 31st December 2009 (except for the months of May 2004 and March 2009) as told by soldiers in the United States Army. Each is a ‘SIGACT’ or Significant Action in the war. They detail events as seen and heard by the US military troops on the ground in Iraq and are the first real glimpse into the secret history of the war that the United States government has been privy to throughout.
The reports detail 109,032 deaths in Iraq, comprised of 66,081 ‘civilians’; 23,984 ‘enemy’ (those labeled as insurgents); 15,196 ‘host nation’ (Iraqi government forces) and 3,771 ‘friendly’ (coalition forces). The majority of the deaths (66,000, over 60%) of these are civilian deaths.That is 31 civilians dying every day during the six year period.
For the past ten weeks Al Jazeera has had complete access to those files. As part of its forthcoming coverage, Al Jazeera reveals how the US military gave a secret order not to investigate torture by Iraqi authorities discovered by American troops.
Continue reading “The Iraq War Logs: Torture and Complicity”
The Iraq war: Success or blunder?
Iraq War reparations
You thought it won’t happen. You were wrong. Finally reparations for the suffering caused by the war are in order…by the Iraqis to the United States! Yes–you heard it right. The United States–which has killed over 2.4 million Iraqis since 1991 and displaced 5 million more–will be paid $400 million by the Iraqis in war reparations.
Banning Slaughter
by Kathy Kelly
In the early 1970’s, I spent two summers slinging pork loins in a Chicago meat-packing factory. Rose Packing Company paid a handful of college students $2.25 an hour to process pork. Donning combat boots, yellow rubber aprons, goggles, hairnets and floor length white smocks that didn’t stay white very long, we’d arrive on the factory floor. Surrounded by deafening machinery, we’d step over small pools of blood and waste, adjusting ourselves to the rancid odors, as we headed to our posts. I’d step onto a milk crate in front of a huge bin full of thawing pork loins. Then, swinging a big, steel T-hook, I’d stab a large pork loin, pull it out of the pile, and plop it on a conveyor belt carrying meat into the pickle juice machine. Sometimes a roar from a foreman would indicate a switch to processing Canadian pork butts, which involved swiftly shoving metal chips behind rectangular cuts of meat. On occasion, I’d be assigned to a machine that squirted meat waste meat into a plastic tubing, part of the process for making hot dogs. I soon became a vegetarian.
But, up until some months ago, if anyone had ever said to me, “Kathy Kelly, you slaughtered animals,” I’m sure I would have denied it, and maybe even felt a bit indignant. Recently, I realized that in fact I did participate in animal slaughter. It’s similar, isn’t it, to widely held perceptions here in the United States about our responsibility for killing people in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Iraq and other areas where the U.S. routinely kills civilians.
Evidence of WMD found in Iraq: The tragic legacy of Depleted Uranium
by Steven Harkins
Conspiracy theories exist in ‘the realm of myth’, where ‘imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored’ [i]. This is according to a website created by the US State Department to debunk a range of outlandish conspiracy theories.
Among the theories criticized on the website are conspiracies regarding the assassination of JFK, the moon landings, and the September 11th attacks [ii]. Alongside these well-known sources of wild speculation is the subject of depleted uranium (DU). The website states:
Uranium evokes very powerful fears. It is associated with atomic weapons, mass annihilation, radiation sickness, cancer and birth defects. Depleted uranium evokes these same fears, despite the fact that it has been depleted of much of its radioactivity. Fear-based associations can be more powerful than logic and facts. Compare how you feel about tungsten to how you feel about depleted uranium. Both are heavy metals, but “depleted uranium” might sound scarier to you [iii].
So the US State Department argue that when it comes to conspiracy theories ‘evidence is ignored’ and that it is ‘fear-based associations’ and not ‘logic and facts’ that have caused people to make a connection between birth defects, cancer and depleted uranium.
Continue reading “Evidence of WMD found in Iraq: The tragic legacy of Depleted Uranium”
A Prism; Wet With Wars
by Sinan Antoon
this is the chapter of
devastation
this is our oasis
an angle where wars intersect
tyrants accumulate around our eyes
in the shackle’s verandah
there is enough space for applause
let us applaud
another evening climbs
the city’s candles
technological hoofs crush the night
a people is being slaughtered across short waves
but the radio vomits raw statements
and urges us to
applaud
with a skeleton of a burning umbrella
we receive this rain
a god sleeps on our flag
but the horizon is prophetless
maybe they will come if we
applaud
let us applaud
we will baptize our infants with smoke
plough their tongues
with flagrant war songs
or UN resolutions
teach them the bray of slogans
and leave them beside burning nipples
in an imminent wreckage
and applaud
before we weave an autumn for tyrants
we must cross this galaxy of barbed wires
and keep on repeating
HAPPY NEW WAR!
Baghdad, March 1991
— Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist and translator.
The Left and Iraq: Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory
Alexander Cockburn’s comments about the left’s inability to acknowledge US defeat in Iraq and the bogus ‘war for oil’ thesis are perceptive. But in Tariq Ali and Seumas Milne he has chosen the wrong avatars for this odd belief in the empire’s invincibility. Tariq is a good friend and I have had this conversation with him several times. I know for a fact that he rejects the reductionist ‘war for oil’ argument. (He made his position clear in the Q&A after his recent London Review of Books lecture.) Milne sometimes hews to the establishment left line, but has shown far more independence and courage than some other left luminaries. I’d rather Cockburn had directed his criticism at Noam Chomsky, whose defective and predictable analysis of the Middle East continues to mislead many.
“The US isn’t withdrawing from Iraq at all – it’s rebranding the occupation… What is abundantly clear is that the US , whose embassy in Baghdad is now the size of Vatican City , has no intention of letting go of Iraq any time soon.” So declared Seumas Milne of The Guardian on August 4.
Milne is not alone among writers on the left arguing that even though most Americans think it’s all over, They say that Uncle Sam still effectively occupies Iraq, still rules the roost there. They gesture at 50,000 US troops in 94 military bases, “advising” and training the Iraqi army, “providing security” and carrying out “counter-terrorism” missions. Outside US government forces there is what Jeremy Scahill calls the “coming surge” of contractors in Iraq , swelling up from the present 100,000. Hillary Clinton wants to increase the number of military contractors working for the state department alone from 2,700 to 7,000. Of these contractors 11,000 are armed mercenaries, mostly “third country nationals, typically from the developing world. “The advantage of an outsourced occupation,” Milne writes, “ is clearly that someone other than US soldiers can do the dying to maintain control of Iraq.
Continue reading “The Left and Iraq: Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory”
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