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Wayne Madsen Report - November 18, 2005
Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that "Al Qaeda" is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by (…)

ACLU, el-Masri SUING CIA for Flight to Prison, Torture
CIA prisons and CIA flights are a growing front-page story, and Khaled el-Masri is a good example of why we all should oppose such extrajudcial flights and prisons. El-Masri is the first to sue the CIA for "rendition," or kidnapping-to-torture. The ACLU in New York will assist. This article presents the kind of information they will use. He can’t sue the CIA? He can, and there are individuals he can sue, including top officials (…)

Just found this application on HuffPo. Thought it was interesting. Anyone out there looking for work? I did notice the last sentence under the "Description" regarding "no funds available yet".
_ FGO for Applicants
AID logo IRAQ: Strategic City Stabilization Initiative (SCSI)
General Information Document Type: Grants Notice Funding Opportunity Number: RFA 267-06-001 Posted Date: Nov 30, 2005 Original Due Date for Applications: Jan 31, 2006 The Request for (…)

By Robert Hirschfield
TRAVELING around southern Iraq in the late 1990s to investigate the effects of U.N. economic sanctions on ordinary Iraqis, Jesuit Father Simon Harak stopped at a hospital in Basra. Meeting with him and his colleagues from the anti-sanction group Voices in the Wilderness, Dr. Jenan Hassan briefed them about the medical horrors she and other doctors were confronting as a result of the use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons by the U.S. Army in southern Iraq during the 1991 (…)

The top US general has defended the use of white phosphorus munitions in combat against Iraqi fighters as a legitimate tool of the military.
Allegations that civilians were victims of white phosphorus bombs in the Falluja battle last year has put the spotlight on a weapon that showers down incendiary particles that burn right through skin.
"A bullet goes through skin even faster than white phosphorus does," General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a Pentagon (…)

FBI Is Taking Another Look at Forged Prewar Intelligence By Peter Wallsten, Tom Hamburger and Josh Meyer, Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON - The FBI has reopened an inquiry into one of the most intriguing aspects of the pre-Iraq war intelligence fiasco: how the Bush administration came to rely on forged documents linking Iraq to nuclear weapons materials as part of its justification for the invasion.
The documents inspired intense U.S. interest in the buildup to the war - and they led the (…)

by Matthew Rothschild
We’re beginning to see the outlines of Bush’s military strategy in Iraq. It’s not withdrawal. Don’t kid yourself.
Bush intends to prevail.
While he may, under domestic pressure, bring 10,000 or 20,000 or even 50,000 troops home, he has no intention of ending this war.
As Seymour Hersh notes in the latest issue of The New Yorker, Bush plans on replacing a reliance on U.S. troops with a reliance on U.S. bombers.
"Departing American troops will be replaced by (…)

by Yildiz Onen Coordinator of the Global Peace and Justice Coalition of Turkey
As the Global Peace and Justice Coalition we had a press conference in İstanbul on 30 of November about the death and torture flights of CIA and its using Turkish airspace and Sabiha Gökçen airport.
Last week, there was some news about that CIA has been carrying some people, who had been captured by CIA through secret operations, to the secret prisons which was built in the other countries. In the news it was (…)

By Andrew Grice and Stephen Castle in Brussels and Philip Thornton
Tony Blair’s proposals to end the deadlock over the EU budget provoked strong opposition from eastern European nations even though he offered to cut Britain’s rebate by about a fifth.
Under fire at home for his pledge to offer concessions over the rebate without concrete reforms on farm spending, Mr Blair faced direct criticism from leaders in central and eastern Europe at talks with them in Budapest yesterday. However, (…)

By ELI STEPHENS
I wanted to take a look at the "opposition" response to George Bush’s speech and plan today. There is a transcript online, but you have to be a Federal News Service subscriber to see it, and, for a 30-minute news conference by two major Senators, the news coverage has been minimal to say the least (more on right-wing blogs and news sites than in the mainstream media). So I had to make my own transcript from the C-SPAN video (not a direct link, must scroll down). What (…)