contributions

By Marie Woolf
The senior Foreign Office lawyer who resigned after ministers ignored her advice that the war in Iraq was illegal has issued a damning legal critique of the occupation, claiming that the alleged abuse of prisoners "could amount to war crimes".
In her first newspaper interview since her resignation, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the former deputy legal adviser to the Foreign Office, said that the basis for going to war should always be based on "facts" rather than an "assertion" (…)

The U.S military launched a coordinated airstrike Monday on a safehouse in the turbulent city of Fallujah, the military said. At least 12 people were killed, officials and witnesses said.
Ambulances sped to the eastern side of the city, where U.S. airstrikes have frequently targeted safehouses believed to be used by members of Jordanian militant Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi’s network. Rescue workers picked up remains of the dead, witnesses said.
According to Iraqi witnesses, the house was not (…)

In a statement delivered to Aljazeera, a purported Iraqi resistance group has said it has sent a US marine, who had earlier been reported killed, to a safe place.
The group, calling itself "Islamic Response - the security wing of the Islamic Resistance of Iraq", said on Monday it sent Cpl Wasif Ali Hassun, a US Marine of Lebanese heritage, to a "safe place" but without specifying the exact location.
The armed group said Hassun announced he will not rejoin the US army.
The US marines (…)

Foreign Minister of Iraq Hoshyar Zebari told the Sunday Telegraph of London that his government had gathered information from intelligence services showing support by some neighboring countries to the insurgents.
Although Zebari did not mention Syria by name, other high ranking officials in the new Iraqi government pointed the fingers at Syria and Iran as the countries that are most to blame for training and funding foreign elements in Iraq to disrupt the country’s move towards democracy. (…)

KGB will always control. Where has the money gone? To the people? Just ask a normal Russian if they are happy?
Putin is in idiot that needs his mother. He is milking the cows thru the fence for free.
A new Russia is waiting for birth and will not be swayed by a bunch of partime internet junkies that have nothing better to do than to play avatar games.
A revolution in Moscow is brewing and you will be left out in the cold.
The people of Russia that have not are the ones that concern (…)

The Israelis just had to get in on the fun. But then the stories of torture – of hooded, humiliated inmates at Abu Ghraib and other facilities – did have a familiar air, as if the Israelis were tutoring their American sock-puppets in the finer points of squeezing those ragheads until they squealed. Torture – of the "mild" variety – has the official imprimatur of Israel’s high court, and it makes perfect sense that the Israelis would be called in as "experts" in the art (science?) of (…)

A military intelligence analyst who recently completed duty at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq said Wednesday that the 16-year-old son of a detainee there was abused by U.S. soldiers in order to break his father’s resistance to interrogators.
The analyst said the teenager was stripped naked, thrown in the back of an open truck, driven around in the cold night air, splattered with mud and then presented to his father at Abu Ghraib, the prison at the center of the ongoing scandal over abuse of (…)

According to information from the International Red Cross, more than a 100 children are imprisoned in Iraq, including in the infamous prison Abu Ghraib.
The German TV magazine "Report" revealed that there has been abuse of children and youth by the coalition forces.
Mainz - "Between January and May of this year we’ve registered 107 children, during 19 visits in 6 different detention locations" the representative of the International Red Cross, Florian Westphal, told the TV station SWR’s (…)

By DOUGLAS JEHL
ASHINGTON, July 4 — A network of Saddam Hussein’s cousins, operating in part from Syria and Jordan, is actively involved in the smuggling of guns, people and money into Iraq to support the anti-American insurgency, say American government officials and a prominent Iraqi.
The operations involve at least three cousins from the Majid family who now live in Syria and in Europe, the American officials said. A leading figure among them is Fatiq Suleiman al-Majid, a cousin of (…)

By Jude Wanniski
January 28, 2003
We posted the quiz yesterday, the day the United Nations weapons inspectors made their first report to the United Nations Security Council on their progress to date. Today we post the correct answers, correct at least according to our best sources and analysis. If you got all the answers correct, you are a certified dove. And vice versa. There is, though, some room for quibbling.
1. Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. True or False. (…)