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Aljazeera.net
Monday 19 July 2004 - A suspected car bomb has blown up outside a police station in southwestern Baghdad killing at least eight people and wounding four police officers, Iraqi officials, witnesses and the US military said.
Iraqi National Guard Lieutenant Adnan Ghathan said eight people were killed in the blast, and another guardsman said he believed all were civilians.
The attack took place shortly after 0800am (0400 GMT) on Monday as people were arriving at work.
US (…)

Julian Borger reports on the shadow rightwing intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force
The Guardian
As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into (…)

By SCOTT RITTER
Earlier this year, I testified before two investigative bodies — the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Butler Commission — responsible for probing the massive failure of, respectively, the American and British intelligence services to properly assess the status of Iraq’s ethereal weapons of mass destruction programs. The alleged existence of those programs was the foundation of the justification for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The Senate committee (…)

The experience is horrifying. Among soldiers and Marines from combat units involved in the early stages of the war in Iraq:
Nine in 10 had been attacked or ambushed and had been fired upon.
More than half had killed an enemy fighter.
Eighty-six percent knew someone who had been killed or seriously injured.
Almost all had seen death, and half had handled the dead.
Most saw ill or injured women or children they could not help.
Twenty-eight percent of Marines had killed a civilian. (…)

By Jenifer Johnston
PRESIDENT George Bush has promised that if re-elected in November he will make regime change in Iran his new target.
Bush named Iran as part of the Axis of Evil along with North Korea and Iraq almost three years ago. A US government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that military action would not be overt in changing Iran, but rather that the US would work to stir revolts in the country and hope to topple the current conservative religious leadership. (…)

By Doug from Jenin ( ISM ) Barta, Jenin. A crowd of over 100 Palestinians and Internationals protesters gathered today outside the checkpoint Um al Rihan which controls traffic in and out of Barta, a village west of Jenin on the green line. The situation in Barta is dire. It’s divided in two by the green line. On the west side are Palestinian Israelis who have Israeli citizenship but are denied the right to free speech or to vote, and on the east are Palestinians with no rights (…)

by Peter Beaumont
Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that ’400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves’ is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.
The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq’s mass graves.
In that publication - Iraq’s Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves (…)

A 3 million US dollar reward offered for the head of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi presented to the families of the soldiers killed in the Iraq war from both sides.

In Arroyo saves one man but at what cost?’ (17/07) Mark Baker says Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s decision to pull out the Filiprino troops from Iraq puts "populism ahead of principle". And Prime Minister John Howard has said "caving in to militants demands would not give Manila immunity from attack".
Mr. Baker and Mr. Howard fail to mention that the Philippines had specified an August withdrawal in its original troop deployment agreement with the (…)

by Peter Beaumont
Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that ’400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves’ is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.
The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq’s mass graves.
In that publication - Iraq’s Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves (…)