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By Thanassis Cambanis
BAGHDAD — American soldiers stormed into Sajid Kadhum Bouri al-Bawi’s house three hours after midnight on May 17, breaking two doors and rousing the dozen children who live there.
An hour later, family members recalled, the soldiers led a hooded man from the house and told the family they were arresting Bawi. Only after the soldiers left with what appeared to be a prisoner did Bawi’s brother find his bloodied body, shot five times and stuffed behind a refrigerator (…)

By Sergei Blagov
Russia’s unexpected announcement that it supplied the U.S. with intelligence that Saddam Hussein was planning to carry out terrorist attacks on American soil has left many here guessing about the motives behind the assertion.
In remarks broadcast on state television, President Vladimir Putin said that after the Sept. 11 al-Qaeda attacks on the U.S. and before the start of the military operation against Iraq early last year, Russian intelligence obtained the information (…)

A lawyer defending a US soldier charged with abusing prisoners in Iraq has said he would seek to put US President George Bush and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld on the witness stand.
Bush and Rumsfeld sidestepped the Geneva Convention in their "war on terror", civilian defence counsel Paul Bergrin said on Monday.
He was speaking to reporters after an impassioned address in the courtroom on the first day of initial hearings being held in Baghdad this week for three US soldiers (…)

Fadel Badran
Iraqi security officers said yesterday they found no trace of the militants US commanders say were targeted in an airstrike on the hotspot town of Fallujah, only ordinary civilians, 26 of whom were killed.
But Iraq’s interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi defended the airstrike and said the US military had informed his government before the raid on what it said was a safe house used by militants led by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian described by the Americans as Al-Qaeda’s (…)

By Tom Allard, Defence Reporter
The Federal Government has refused to make public a detailed 61-page dossier outlining what Australians knew about prisoner abuse in Iraq, with the Minister for Defence, Robert Hill, claiming some details would offend the US.
Senator Hill was yesterday censured in the Senate for his role in misleading Parliament and his failure to take responsibility for the false statements made by him, the Prime Minister and senior Defence officials.
Senator Hill had (…)

BAGHDAD, Iraq — A U.S. quick reaction force has found the bodies of four U.S. Marines gunned down west of Baghdad on Monday, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt (search), coalition deputy operations chief.
Troops searched for the missing service members after they failed to report to their headquarters as required, Kimmitt said.
The Marines were conducting security and stability operations in Ramadi (search), a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad told Fox News.
A videotape delivered to (…)

Did you know that the CIA places journalists in corporate and alternative media outlets for disinformation and discrediting purposes? Remember Co-intelpro? Did you ever wonder about guys like Hitchens?
Unfairenheit 9/11 The lies of Michael Moore. By Christopher Hitchens Posted Monday, June 21, 2004, at 12:26 PM PT
One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, (…)

Projects By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
Struggling with bureaucratic problems in spending the money appropriated by Congress to rebuild Iraq, American authorities are moving quietly and quickly to spend $2.5 billion from a different source, Iraqi oil revenue, for projects employing tens of thousands of Iraqis, especially in the country’s hot spots, Bush administration officials say.
The spending program, which was started unannounced, has been undertaken in consultation with Iraqi ministers, (…)

Gary Younge in New York
Israeli military and intelligence operatives are active in Kurdish areas of Iran, Syria and Iraq, providing training for commando units and running covert operations that could further destabilise the entire region, according to a report in the New Yorker magazine.
The article was written by Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who exposed the abuse scandal in Abu Ghraib. It is sourced primarily to unnamed former and current intelligence officials in (…)

Shiite Muslim firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has been invited to the July political conference to select a national council that will advise Iraq’s interim government, an Iraqi official has said.
"An invitation has been sent to Moqtada al-Sadr," said Fuad Maasum, the chairman of the committee preparing the conference.
"Moqtada al-Sadr has begun to transform his militia into a political organisation, which is considered a positive step and his movement has roots in the country," Mr (…)