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Wars and conflicts

  • How Rummy’s Failed War Plan Caused the Loss of More Than 1,000 US Soldiers in Iraq
    30 October 2004 par (Open-Publishing)
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    by Jason Leopold
    In October 2002, the New York Times reported that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered the military’s regional commanders to rewrite all of their war plans to capitalize on precision weapons, better intelligence and speedier deployment in the event the United States decided to invade Iraq, ignoring concerns from career military officials that American military forces will suffer a huge number of casualties under Rumsfeld’s plan.
    Rumsfeld denied, in an Oct. 12, (…)

  • Blame game at the U.N.
    30 October 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    Revelations about the U.N. Oil for Food Program get uglier and uglier. Designed to allow Iraq to collect revenues to pay for humanitarian supplies such as food and medicine, it appears to have been manipulated by Baghdad to reward friends of the regime and enrich the country’s leadership. The damage has been magnified by allegations of corruption and negligence on the part of the United Nations. There needs to be a complete investigation of what went wrong with the Oil for Food Program, but (…)

  • Appeasing Israel
    30 October 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    Bush and Kerry put Israel first - and ignore the rise of fascism in the ’Promised Land’
    by Justin Raimondo
    The collapse and seemingly imminent demise of Yasser Arafat once again draws our attention to the plight of the Palestinian people at the hands of their Israeli occupiers: just as the Jewish state keeps an entire people captive in the twin concentration camps of Gaza and the West Bank, so Arafat was himself incarcerated, physically confined to his headquarters in Ramallah. (…)

  • Osama bin Laden: The statement
    30 October 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    Following is an excerpt from the speech by the al-Qa’ida leader, Osama bin Laden, addressing the American people in a video, parts of which were aired by al-Jazeera television last night, as translated by Reuters
    O American people, I am speaking to tell you about the ideal way to avoid another Manhattan, about war and its causes and results.
    Security is an important foundation of human life and free people do not squander their security, contrary to Bush’s claims that we hate freedom. (…)

  • 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead, says study
    30 October 2004 par (Open-Publishing)
    1 comment

    by Sarah Boseley
    About 100,000 Iraqi civilians - half of them women and children - have died in Iraq since the invasion, mostly as a result of airstrikes by coalition forces, according to the first reliable study of the death toll from Iraqi and US public health experts.
    The study, which was carried out in 33 randomly-chosen neighbourhoods of Iraq representative of the entire population, shows that violence is now the leading cause of death in Iraq. Before the invasion, most people died (…)

  • Stuck in Guantanamo
    29 October 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    Murat Kurnaz from Bremen, Germany is imprisoned in Guantanamo. The United States accuses him of being associated with a suicide bomber. The only problem? The suicide bomber is still alive and living as a free man in Germany. Kurnaz, though, remains behind bars.
    The military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay holds its hearings at Camp Delta in a run-down barracks building with red carpeting and iron rings embedded in the floor to which the prisoners can be chained like dogs.
    Despite the heat and (…)

  • The Great Delusion Kerrycrats and the War
    29 October 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
    I asked one usually radical friend of mine, now a Kerrycrat, how she could support a fellow who pledges a “better”, wider war in Iraq and then a march on Teheran. “Oh” she said airily, “you can’t believe anything a candidate will say.”
    From where we sit, here at mission control, CounterPunch hq, (currently a facility known as the Claremont Inn off Interstate 10 east of LA, where Jeffrey St Clair is watching three inches of rain sluicing down on the San Gabriel (…)

  • White House of Horrors
    29 October 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    By MAUREEN DOWD
    Dick Cheney peaked too soon. We’ve still got a few days left until Halloween.
    It was scary enough when we thought the vice president had created his own reality for spin purposes. But if he actually believes that Iraq is "a remarkable success story,’’ it’s downright spooky. He’s already got his persona for Sunday: he’s the mad scientist in the haunted mansion, fiddling with test tubes to force the world to conform to his twisted vision.
    After 9/11, Mr. Cheney swirled (…)

  • A month of mini ’October surprises’
    29 October 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    A flurry of revelations, from Iraq’s missing explosives to the flu vaccine shortage, have touched this year’s presidential race.
    By Linda Feldmann | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
    WASHINGTON - On the eve of a presidential contest, late-breaking events can have an outsize impact. While nothing has risen to the level of a blockbuster "October surprise" - the term coined from the 1980 race, when Democrats feared Ronald Reagan and his friends were secretly arranging to delay (…)

  • Civilian death toll in Iraq exceeds 100,000
    29 October 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in violence since the U.S.-led invasion last year, American public health experts have calculated in a report that estimates there were 100,000 "excess deaths" in 18 months.
    The rise in the death rate was mainly due to violence and much of it was caused by U.S. air strikes on towns and cities.
    "Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq," said Les Roberts of (…)