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Pratap Chatterjee
New testimony from former Halliburton workers and congressional auditors released in Washington, D.C., this week has revealed millions of dollars worth of wasteful practices, major over billing and virtually no oversight of the company’s work to support the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003.
Under an agreement for logistical support for Operation Iraqi Freedom, Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), a Halliburton subsidiary, has received $4.5 billion for (…)

An influential U.S. newspaper, The New York Times, wrote in its June 20 edition, that Kurds in Northern Iraq were changing the region’s demographic and political structure by confiscating fields, and forcing thousand of Iraqi Arabs into refugee camps.
The New York Times reported that while thousands of Kurdish villages in the region were destroyed during Saddam Hussein’s era, Arabs who settled in these places were forcibly sent away by Kurds with little American interference.
Thousands (…)

A South Korean translator working for a company that supplies equipment to US occupation forces in Iraq has been executed after a deadline set by his captors passed.
In a videotape received by Aljazeera, the resistance group Jamat al-Tawhid and Jihad said it was fulfilling a pledge it made yesterday that the 33-old-year South Korean translator Kim Sun-Il would be beheaded if their demands were not met by South Korean government.
The captors threatened on Sunday to kill Kim, who was (…)

by Dahr Jamail
The floor of my hotel rumbled as yet another bomb detonated in central Baghdad at 8:55 am today. My colleague down the hall showed up and asked, “Did you feel that?” I responded, “Yeah, Abu Talat is scheduled to show at 9 so we can go to work…get your stuff.”
As usual, Abu Talat was right on time and we were off into the heat and traffic, inching our way toward the blast sight near the Central Bank.
The usual crowd milled about a crumbled area of curb where the small (…)

By Walter Pincus and Dan Eggen
An allegation that a high-ranking al Qaeda member was an officer in Saddam Hussein’s private militia may have resulted from confusion over Iraqi names, a senior administration official said yesterday.
Former Navy secretary John Lehman, a Republican member of the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said Sunday that documents found in Iraq "indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam’s Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very (…)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate refused Monday to change a Pentagon policy banning media coverage of America’s war dead as their remains arrive in flag-draped caskets.
"It’s an outrage," said Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who had sponsored legislation to restore coverage of homecoming ceremonies at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
The New Jersey Democrat said the Pentagon directive that requires strict censorship, "issued just as the Iraq war began ... prevents the American people from seeing the (…)

The report of US Pulitzer winner journalist Seymour Hersh that the Israeli intelligence service has been collaborating with Iraqi Kurds and has been training Kurdish commandos, dominated headlines of Turkish newspapers on Tuesday.
Turkish papers are stressing Turkey’s uneasiness with the activities of Israeli agents in Northern Iraq. Basing their news on Hersh’s report in the New Yorker magazine, the papers said that Israeli agents have been provoking Kurdish groups to form an independent (…)

By RON JACOBS
In one more instance of duplicity and hypocrisy as regards the US plans for Iraq, Undersecretary of State John Bolton stated June 8, 2004 that Iraq could one day build nuclear power plants. Although that day is, in Bolton’s words "a ways down the road," it could happen once things settled down there. When that will be is anyone’s guess, of course, but that won’t stop the nuclear industry from salivating over more taxpayer dollars going into their pockets.
Bolton’s statement (…)

By Mike Whitney
“In Iraq we meant to render futile both the theory and the practice of terrorism; what we have done instead is to endow it with diplomatic credentials, making credible the policies of blind assassination.” Lewis H. Lapham; Harper’s
The ink had barely dried on the new Iraq sovereignty resolution, before US warplanes were dumping bombs on a residential target in Falluja. The raid was timed to insure the UN endorsement was passed prior to the continuation of hostilities. The (…)

by Frank Wallis
The Use of Torture
During his invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush warned Iraqis about their treatment of American prisoners of war on 23 March 2003: “I expect them to be treated, the POWs, I expect to be treated humanely, just like we’re treating the prisoners that we have captured humanely. If not, the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals.”
A Bush radio address on 5 April 2003 claimed “...the citizens of Iraq are coming to know what kind of (…)