contributions

Prisoner was beaten and denied aid. An inquiry was mishandled, an investigator says.
By Kevin Sack
A military investigator has concluded that low-ranking Marines repeatedly struck two defenseless Iraqis at a makeshift prison camp last June, and one of the detainees died after he was left disabled and naked under a scorching sun.
In two reports obtained by The Times, Marine Col. William V. Gallo also criticized an investigation into the death, saying the deceased Iraqi’s bodily fluids (…)

by Dahr Jamail
Baqouba, Iraq. Just six days before Iraq’s interim government is to gain partial sovereignty from the US, resistance fighters launched a series of coordinated attacks against US forces and Iraqi government targets in Baghdad, Mosul, Ramadi and Baqouba today. Fierce fighting between the Iraqi resistance and US forces has killed at least 85 people and wounded 320, according to the Iraqi Ministry of Health..
Here in Baqouba, a small city 50 kilometers northeast of Baghdad, (…)

By Alix de la Grange
Editor’s note: Coordinated attacks and skirmishes in several Iraqi cities on Thursday killed at least 66 people and wounded more than 250. Forty-four people were killed in a series of car bomb blasts in the northern city of Mosul and 216 wounded. Fighting in al-Anbar province, where there were clashes in Fallujah and Ramadi, killed at least nine people and wounded 27, and fighting around Baquba killed 13 and wounded 15.
BAGHDAD - On the eve of the so-called transfer (…)

NEW YORK (CNN) — A lawyer for former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has alleged that Red Cross documents show his client has been abused while held in detention.
Jordanian defense lawyer Mohammad Rashdan showed CNN the documents, which were filled out after the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) visited the captured leader on January 21.
Rashdan showed one page of the ICRC report, on which various boxes can be checked to indicate the physical condition of a detainee.
"Good (…)

Around 100 people have died in a wave of attacks targeting mainly Iraqi security personnel across the occupied country in the run-up to the US handover of limited authority.
Most of the deaths were in the northern city of Mosul, where 62 people were killed and 216 injured in a string of car bombings of police buildings.
Apart from the Iraqi casualties, the US military said an American soldier was killed and three wounded in the blasts. It said a security guard was also killed.
Clashes (…)

Army officers to be charged Fort Carson-based pair to face 2 counts in alleged suffocation of Iraqi general
By Miles Moffeit, Arthur Kane and Eileen Kelley
U.S. Army officials plan to file negligent-homicide and manslaughter charges against two Fort Carson-based military intelligence officers who allegedly suffocated an Iraqi general during an interrogation in November, The Denver Post has learned.
Two other enlisted soldiers face dereliction-of-duty charges in the fatal interrogation, (…)

By John Intardonato
Claiming Americans were "bushwhacked," Scott Ritter, former United Nations chief weapons inspector in Iraq, believes President Bush not only hid the truth, but he used deception to get citizen support for the war.
"Instead of presenting the issue honestly to the American people, face-to-face, and letting us decide, we were bushwhacked behind our backs," he said.
Ritter, who is one of the Bush Administration’s principal critics over the war, will deliver a first-hand (…)

Explosions and gunfire rocked the turbulent city of Fallujah for a second day Friday, after coordinated attacks in other Iraqi cities killed about 100 people less than a week before Iraq’s new government takes power.
U.S. tanks and armored vehicles maneuvered on the highway near the edges of Fallujah, firing in all directions, while armed men in an eastern suburb returned fire, witnesses said. Seven people died in two days of exchanges there, hospital officials said.
Hours later, a (…)

by Robert Steinback
Let’s alter history just a little bit, and imagine that President Bush had given us an accurate case for war in Iraq 18 months ago.
My fellow Americans, I’m appearing before you today to ask for your support as I make the most solemn decision a president can make: Committing our military troops to war.We must remove Saddam Hussein from power, although his only known threat to the United States is that he hates us. While we know that Hussein possessed and used weapons (…)

by Human Rights Watch
Documents released Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Defense on interrogation procedures at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, raise more questions than they answer, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch called for a 9/11-style independent commission to probe the issue of detainee abuse.
The released documents stop in April 2003 and do not cover practices at Abu Ghraib and other military prisons in Iraq, Human Rights Watch said. Even so, they show that in December, (…)