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Miami Herald
Eight days before U.S. caretakers are scheduled to turn over control of Iraq to an interim government, Pentagon officials told Congress that American soldiers are likely to remain there for years.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the Bush administration’s strongest advocates for the invasion, told the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that it would be inadvisable to set a deadline for the departure of American troops, who make up the vast majority of a (…)

By Blake Morrison and Peter Eisler
The general who pushed for more aggressive interrogation tactics at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison predicted better intelligence within a month if his strategies were adopted, according to a copy of his classified plan obtained by USA TODAY.
In the plan, sent in early September to top military officials in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller promised that "a significant improvement in actionable intelligence will be realized within 30 days." His strategy involved (…)

Kiev. Two seamen recently freed from Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison have told the Ukrainian official responsible for securing their release that U.S. guards at the facility treated them like dogs’’, but much better than Iraqi prisoners.
Mykola Mazurenko and Ivan Soschenko, respectively the Ukrainian captain and first mate of the tanker ship Navstar-1, had been incarcerated at the facility near Baghdad since last October. They were found guilty by an Iraqi court of having attempted to (…)

by Amitai Etzioni
Here we go again. The United States is about to fall prey to its own propaganda.
President Bush has repeatedly said we will grant "full and complete sovereignty" to Iraq on June 30. We’ve said we’ll turn over Saddam Hussein for trial and punishment and that the occupation will finally be replaced by Iraqi self-rule. But these grand promises are as unbelievable as they are unattainable.
Already we’ve begun to qualify some of them: The Iraqis will take "legal" custody (…)

by FAIR
The Bush administration’s long-running attempts to link Iraq and Al Qaeda were dealt a serious blow when the September 11 commission’s June 16 interim report indicated that there did not appear to be a "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and Osama bin Laden, and that there was no evidence that Iraq was involved in the September 11 attacks.
But if you were watching the Fox News Channel, you saw something very different, as the conservative cable network eagerly defended the (…)

By Nicolas Pelham in Baghdad
The US-led occupation authority in Baghdad has warned Iraq’s interim government not to carry out its threat of declaring martial law, insisting that only the US-led coalition has the right to adopt emergency powers after the June 30 handover of sovereignty.
Senior American officials say Iraq’s authorities are bound by human rights clauses in the interim constitution, known as the Transitional Administrative Law, prohibiting administrative detention.
But (…)

by Kurt Nimmo
Obviously, things are not moving quickly enough for Israel. So they have sent Mossad agents, made over as businessmen, into the Kurdish area of Iraq. Plan: agitate for an independent Kurdistan carved out of Iraq. Or so a former CIA analyst has told Seymour Hersh. This was apparently confirmed by a top dog at the spook agency:
[A] senior C.I.A. official acknowledged in an interview last week that the Israelis were indeed operating in Kurdistan. He told me that the Israelis (…)

By Lawrence Smallman
Unaccountable and unregulated, the thousands of mercenaries currently operating in Iraq may not remain untouchable for much longer.
US viceroy Paul Bremmer is to issue an order defining the status of foreign troops and workers in Iraq before 30 June, according to a senior official quoted by Reuters.
But the multi-billion dollar question is whether Bremer’s decree will spell out the legal status of so-called private contractors. State and corporate secrecy (…)

By TERENCE HUNT
WASHINGTON — President Bush claimed the right to waive anti-torture laws and treaties covering prisoners of war after the invasion of Afghanistan, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized guards to strip detainees and threaten them with dogs, according to documents released Tuesday.
The documents were handed out at the White House in an effort to blunt allegations that the administration had authorized torture against al-Qaida prisoners from Afghanistan and Iraq. (…)

There are striking similarities seen on the videotape of the South Korean hostage whose body was found Tuesday in Iraq and the videotaped execution of U.S. hostage Nicholas Berg in May.
The group that claims responsibility for beheading Kim Sun-il also claims to be the same group that killed Berg.
Although U.S. officials indicated that fugitive Islamic militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was behind the Berg killing, one U.S. official said it is not yet known whether al-Zarqawi played a (…)