[...]

The German Prosecutor has discretion to decide whether to initiate an investigation. It is critical that he hear from you so he knows that people around the world support this effort.

For more information on the suit, click here.

[...]

I believe that the war in Iraq is symptomatic of a much deeper global crisis, and that it foreshadows a period in which that crisis ­ a crisis of global capitalism ­ will manifest itself not only in war but in rapidly widening social destabilization, the further militarization of the world system, and simultaneous economic and environmental collapse.

[...]

The programme also hears from a widow whose husband committed suicide aged 44, after returning from five months in the Gulf with the territorial army.

Sandra Mahoney weeps as she recalls finding her husband, Peter, slumped dead in his car in the garage of their home in Botcherby, on the outskirts of Carlisle.

"He put his uniform on for the last time, shaved all his hair off. He got up early and it was just like he was going back to Iraq.

[...]

That is a large one-day toll. 16 injured from direct guerrilla attack, another two in a vehicle accident that may or may not have been produced by the war. And 5 deaths, though two of those were from the weekend, and one from a vehicle collision. It doesn't look like things are miraculously settling down in the aftermath of Fallujah.

Indeed, November was the second-deadliest month for US troops since the invasion itself. That isn't the kind of trend line you would like to see for a successful venture.

Then the rest of the article talks about how inadequate has been the performance of the Iraqi police and national guards, who face intimidation, threats, and even murder at the hands of the guerrillas.

[...]

In a separate attack, a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at a US tank in the town, wounding one US soldier, a spokesman from the US 1st Infantry Division said.

[...]

The big divide between liberals and conservatives in regard to Fallujah is that most liberals do not believe that force can be used to solve problems. They may believe that force is sometimes necessary. But they think it most often just causes new problems. They tend to see the world as complex, not in black and white terms, so that an unalloyed "bad guy" is rare (Bin Laden managed to make himself an exception). Liberals also see military force in the context of the whole society, so that they worry about what happens to children and grandmothers when it is deployed. It is liberals who remember that the Vietnam war killed 2 million Vietnamese peasants. And, they find US military deaths unacceptable.

[...]

Conservatives do believe that force can be used to solve problems. They think in terms of good guys and bad guys, and it seems obvious to them that if you kill the bad guys, then you have solved the problem. Getting at the bad guys may be disruptive to civilian populations, and may cause some collateral damage, and may incur some troop casualties, and all that is bad, but it is necessary and worth it. You can't make omelettes without breaking eggs.

[...]

Aid convoys were able to enter Falluja on Wednesday and Monday, but only toured the town, and were unable to move freely and find any of the civilians who needed assistance.

[...]

US marines have hinted that it could take more than two months to restore basic services such as water and electricity in the devastated town.

[...]

Meanwhile, there are increasing concerns for Falluja residents who left the town before the devastating US offensive.

Shaikh Muhammad Shawki al-Abdali, who lives in a cluster of hamlets just outside Falluja, said many of the 250 families who sought refuge in his village did not have shelter.

The villagers of nearby al-Subaihat said they welcomed the displaced with open arms.

"Friends of mine gave these poor people a room in their house, others gave them mattresses and food," 25-year-old Khalid Jiad said.

"But now there isn't much we can still do for them because we barely have any sugar, flour and rice left. We are almost in the same state as them."

[...]

"US forces allow people to go into al-Hadra al-Muhammadiya area, in Falluja, but they prohibited anybody to enter al-Julan, al-Askari and al-Senai neighbourhoods.

[...]

Meanwhile, the military refused to allow yet another aid convoy into Fallujah. They were turned back because the military personnel told them the Ministry of Health would be allowed to send a relief convoy in “8 or 9 days.”

[...]

While the humanitarian crisis facing families who remain trapped inside Fallujah grinds on, US-backed interim prime minister Ayad Allawi announced yesterday that the crime rate in Fallujah was down after the US siege of the city.

In a sarcastic recreation of U.S. troops pulling down the statue of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in the spring of 2003, some 200 protesters chanted "Go home" after Bush, his wife Laura and other U.S. officials arrived at the Parliament buildings.

[...]

The Ottawa rally was one of about 25 planned across the country to draw attention to Bush's policies and politics during his two-day visit to Canada.

According to local reports, another major protest is planned for Wednesday morning in the eastern city of Halifax, where the US president will make a speech to thank the residents for helping the United States during the "9.11" attacks.

[...]

The agency didn't specify the problems and declined to confirm a New York Times report today that said the Red Cross had seen methods "tantamount to torture" of prisoners in Guantanamo. It was the first time the Red Cross, which has been visiting the prison since January 2002, suggested U.S. practices there amounted to torture, the Times said.

[...]

Documents obtained by the respected International Currency Review, a London-based newsletter for the financial community, allege that the software was provided for Saddam on the authority of President Bush's father when he was in the White House...

[...]

Taser officials say use of the stun gun has led to fewer police shootings and has saved thousands of lives....Amnesty is "out of step" with the needs of law enforcement, the company says.

"We are dismayed that Amnesty International refuses to accept independent and comprehensive reports concerning the safety and effectiveness of the Taser system," Taser spokesman Steve Tuttle said in an e-mail Monday.

[...]

Police say Tasers end violent confrontations before they begin.

[...]

The new provision, included in a budget bill due for a vote on December 8, would add pressure on recalcitrant countries by cutting off civil as well as military aid.

[...]

Washington claims that 96 countries have signed immunity pacts, although some have been kept secret at the request of signatories concerned about the popular reaction at home. Meanwhile, 97 countries have ratified the ICC treaty.

[...]

The plaintiffs wanted the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate the 2003 Massachusetts ruling. But Lambda Legal, a homosexual advocacy group, said it's not surprised that the Supreme Court refused to weigh-in on the Massachusetts ruling.

[...]

"This decision highlights the need for an amendment to the United States Constitution protecting marriage and defining it as the union of one man and one woman. Marriage will be defined by someone," said Mathew Staver, president and general counsel of Liberty Counsel.

"I would rather have it defined by the people of the United States instead of the judiciary," added Staver. "This battle is far from over. The Constitution should protect the citizens of Massachusetts from their own state Supreme Court's usurpation of power."

"Today's sidestep by the Supreme Court further illustrates the need for a national definition of marriage," said Focus on the Family Founder and Chairman Dr. James C. Dobson.

[...]

The report also says: "The critical problem in American public diplomacy directed toward the Muslim world is not one of 'dissemination of information' or even one of crafting and delivering the 'right' message. Rather it is a fundamental problem of credibility. Simply, there is none...

Larry Di Rita, the Pentagon spokesman, said the report had elevated the debate within the Defense Department, but he said no formal decisions had been made about reorganizing how the Pentagon and military communicate.

"We're wrestling with this," Mr. Di Rita said. "But it doesn't change the underlying principle, at least with respect to the Department of Defense. Our job is to put out information to the public that is accurate, and to put it out as quickly as we can."

[...]

According to a report first published last month by Salon.com reporter Mary Jacoby, Gill omitted his role with the American Muslim Council when he filed his employment application and requisite security clearances at the agency. Gill left off his "Standard Form 86" that he served as AMC’s spokesman in 2001.

Homeland Security officials refused to comment on the report, but a spokeswoman for the department's internal watchdog told FOXNews.com that Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin is “looking further into the issue” of Gill's employment at the department.

[...]

Hersh's message is simple and frightening: "(George W.) Bush is an ideologue, a Utopian," Hersh said. "He wants to clean out the Middle East and install democracy. He doesn't care how many body bags come back home. There's nothing more dangerous than an ideologue who is completely bonkers and no one is going to tell him."

President Bush is committed to perpetual war, Hersh said.

[...]

Hersh has talked privately with many in the military and CIA, including some who have recently resigned. All told him that if the Iraq war had gone "right" - say, if the Americans had been greeted as liberators - our military would have marched "right and left" - to Syria and Iran.

"Inside, if you agreed that the road to ending international terrorism ended in Baghdad, you were a hero," Hersh said. "You were promoted. Bush didn't have to ask for information to be slanted his way. If you wanted promotions, or to sit in on the conferences with the big boys, you told him what he wanted to hear. If you disagreed, then your career stalled. Totally wacky."

This sorry state of affairs continues today. President Bush is told only what he wants to hear, and since he doesn't read newspapers, he has become completely divorced from reality.

[...]

We cannot win in Iraq, Hersh said. "We have no intel. We can't find the insurgents. When they bomb something, we only know about it afterward. We can't figure them out. Someone said, 'We play chess, they play Go.' All we can do is lose. All we can do is bomb."

The United States cannot afford this endless war, Hersh said. The dollar is already falling against the Euro, and the Chinese and Japanese hold trillions of dollars of U.S. debt.

"Soon China and Russia will start buying oil in Euros," Hersh said. "They'll stop buying American in Europe because they hate us so much - Disney in Paris is already going down. Large American corporations doing business abroad are going down. We could see more anti-American violence abroad. The dollar will fall. Billionaires are now telling other billionaires to get out of the stock market and buy foreign currency and stocks."

[...]

"We have put ourselves in an enormous hole," he said. "There's no magic story to get us out. The market will crash. Maybe people will come to their senses. Maybe some Democrat will step forward to do the right thing. And maybe the Easter bunny will turn out to be real."

[...]

"The occupation has turned into barbarism," the Friday edition of newspaper Yeni Safak quoted Mehmet Elkatmis, head of parliament's human rights commission, as saying. "The U.S. administration is committing genocide … in Iraq.

"Never in human history have such genocide and cruelty been witnessed. Such a genocide was never seen in the time of the pharaohs nor of Hitler nor of [Benito] Mussolini," Italy's World War II-era fascist leader, Elkatmis said.

"This occupation has entirely imperialist aims," he was quoted as saying.

Elkatmis does not speak for Turkey's government but is a prominent member of the ruling Justice and Development Party, a center-right group with Islamist roots.

[...]

Abu Hammad continues, “Most of the innocent people there stayed in mosques to be closer to God for safety. Even the wounded people were killed. Old ladies with white flags were killed by the Americans! The Americans announced for people to come to a certain mosque if they wanted to leave Fallujah, and even the people who went there carrying white flags were killed!”

[...]

“There was no food, no electricity, no water,” continues Abu Hammad, “We couldn’t even light a candle because the Americans would see it and kill us.”

[...]

He continues on, “There are bodies the Americans threw in the river. I saw them do this! And anyone who stayed thought they would be killed by the Americans, so they tried to swim across the river. Even then the Americans shot them with rifles from the shore! Even if some of them were holding a white flag or white clothes over their heads to show they are not fighters, they were all shot! Even people who couldn’t swim tried to cross the river! They drowned rather than staying to be killed by the Americans.”

[...]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OSAMA BIN LADEN (through translator): Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands. Any nation that does not attack us will not be attacked.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: OK, Walter. What do you make of this?

CRONKITE: Well, I make it out to be initially the reaction that it's a threat to us, that unless we make peace with him, in a sense, we can expect further attacks. He did not say that precisely, but it sounds like that when he says...

KING: The warning.

CRONKITE: What we just heard. So now the question is basically right now, how will this affect the election? And I have a feeling that it could tilt the election a bit. In fact, I'm a little inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, he probably set up bin Laden to this thing.

[...]

"The hardest fighters we have are the former special forces from Saddam's days," Colonel Ron Johnson, commander of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, told reporters late on Friday.

Praising their local knowledge and fighting skills, Johnson singled out one man who fought against him at Nassiriya, the hardest battle of last year's brief war against Saddam's army.

[...]

The defence secretary’s job security has not been enhanced by allegations that he lobbied to scupper the intelligence bill in Congress last week against President George W Bush’s wishes.

[...]

Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney, who first worked with Rumsfeld in the 1970s, are known to feel loyal to the architect of the swift military victories in Afghanistan and — initially — in Iraq. There is a feeling that he deserves to remain in place until after the Iraqi elections in January.

[...]

Other residents of that area also said that banned weapons were used. Abu Sabah, said; “They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud… then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them."

He said that pieces of these strange bombs explode into large fires that burn the skin even when water is thrown on the burns.

Phosphorous arms and the napalm gas are known to have such effects.

[...]

Kassem Mohammed Ahmed, who fled Fallujah last week, said that he witnessed many atrocities committed by U.S. troops in the shattered city. "I watched them roll over wounded people in the street with tanks," he said. "This happened so many times."

[...]

On Saturday, Labor MPs have demanded that British Prime Minister confront the Commons over the use of the deadly gas in Fallujah.

Halifax Labor MP Alice Mahon said: "I am calling on Mr. Blair to make an emergency statement to the Commons to explain why this is happening. It begs the question: 'Did we know about this hideous weapon's use in Iraq?'"

Furious critics have also demanded that Blair threatens the U.S. to pullout British forces from Iraq unless the U.S. stops using the world’s deadliest weapon.

The United Nations banned the use of the napalm gas against civilians in 1980 after pictures of a naked wounded girl in Vietnam shocked the world.

The United States, which didn't endorse the convention, is the only nation in the world still using the deadly weapon.

[...]

The limitation of US forces has become widely apparent over the past few days as Mujahideen outside the city were able to break through US lines on three occasions; once by swimming the river and twice through what was referred to as the strongly fortified northwestern part of the city.

Mafkarat al-Islam reports that the Mujahideen have managed to cut all US supply lines on all land routes that support the US lines around the city.

[...]

As of the time of this filing, Mujahideen control over 65% percent of Fallujah.

[...]

Another development has been the withdrawal of US snipers from the streets overlooking the Euphrates Rive and the city is now exposed from the west according to Mafkarat al-Islam who reported the first US withdrawal from Fallujah during the first siege of the city last April. At that time, Mafkarat al-Islam's reports were met with disbelief and condemnation as other media simply echoed official US claims of nonstop "victory" and "advance" however they were ultimately proven correct.

On Saturday, JUS received reports from both Mafkarat al-Islam's and our own sources that, while the information is slightly different, both conclude that US forces has withdrawn in some areas.

[...]

[T]he Luceys don’t spend too much time wondering what may have happened to their son in the desert, where he told his family he was ordered to shoot two unarmed Iraqi prisoners at close range.

His parents are asking themselves what went wrong when he came home. How did their happy, well-adjusted son lose the good humor and emotional stability he always had? Did they miss too many signs of his suicidal tendencies — the red flags that were suddenly new to them? Did the military and Veterans Affairs Hospital do everything they could to help save their son?

“We’re in so many emotional places, we can’t make any decisions about who to blame,” his father, Kevin Lucey, said.

[...]

“Military people are heavily vetted for any psychological problems before they enter the service,” said Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center. “They’re screened very well when they come in, and they’re supposed to be screened very well when they leave. So when a Marine takes the ultimate step of checking out by taking his own life, it should make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. These are the guys who aren’t supposed to do that.”

[...]

Jeff was never much of a drinker in high school, Lamory said. But when he returned from Iraq, his drinking became “disgusting.”

The two friends were taking classes at HCC. One day, they found a place on campus to smoke a cigarette and talk. Jeff pulled out a whiskey bottle filled with wine and started drinking.

Lamory was stunned.

“What’s going on, man?” he demanded of his friend. “What are you doing to yourself?”

As he drank, Jeff told him about a small Iraqi boy he saw, riddled with bullets and lying dead in the street with an American flag clutched in his hand. Jeff said his truck was being shot at while he was driving by the boy, but he jumped out and brought the boy’s body into an alley — sparing it from more bullet holes.

When Jeff came home, he brought the bloodstained American flag with him.

“He said whenever he goes home at night he just goes into his room and cries and stares at the flag,” Lamory said. “I figured it was something Jeff had to work out. I didn’t understand it when he killed himself.”

[...]

Christmas Eve, [Jeff] sat down with [his sister] Debbie and gave his first account of being told to shoot two unarmed Iraqi soldiers.

The way he told the story, Jeff was about five feet away from two Iraqis — each about his own age — when he was ordered to shoot them. He said he looked them in their eyes before closing his own, then pulled the trigger.

“He took off two dog tags around his neck, threw them at me and said, ‘Don’t you understand? Your brother is a murderer,”’ Debbie said.

The dog tags, which she said had Arabic letters scratched in them, were the ones her brother claimed he took from the soldiers he said he shot.

[...]

Three peshmerga were killed and seven injured when their convoy was attacked on the main road...

[...]

The fighters, under the command of the Kurdistan Democratic party, led by Massoud Barzani, were on their way to protect the party offices in Mosul, which have come under frequent attack since a two-day uprising this month.

The deputy governor, Khasro Gouran, a Kurd, was attacked as he was leaving his office. One of his bodyguards was killed and two people, including his brother, were wounded.

Mosul, Iraq's third largest city, has been simmering for the past fortnight, since nine police stations were captured by insurgents.

Up to 3,200 of the city's 4,000 police officers either deserted or joined the insurgents during the attacks.

[...]

US military commanders say insurgents want to demoralise the country's fledgling security forces in the city, much as they did earlier this month by killing police and torching their stations, prompting most of the 5,000-strong force to quit.

[...]

US airstrikes also leveled a warehouse in which medical supplies were stored next to the health center, Dr. al-Jumaili reports. Ambulances from the city had been confiscated by the government, he says, and the only vehicle left was targeted by US fire, killing the driver and wounding a paramedic. Hamid Salaman of the Falluja General Hospital told the Associated Press that five patients in the ambulance were killed.

[...]

The Iraqi Red Crescent Society has called the health conditions in and around Falluja "catastrophic." One hospital staff member who recently left the city reports that there were severe outbreaks of diarrheal infections among the population, with children and the elderly dying from infectious disease, starvation and dehydration in greater numbers each day. Dr. al-Jumaili, Dr. al-Ani and journalist Badrani each stated that the wounded and children are dying because of lack of medical attention and water. In one case, according to Dr. al-Jumaili, three children died of dehydration when their father was unable to find water for them. The US forces cut off the city's water supply before launching their assault.

[...]

Hatred is only evil when it is directed at the good and at the innocent. It is positively Godly when it is directed at cold-blooded killers, motivating us to fight and eradicate them before more people die.

[...]

"The Iraqi side still has no idea on how money is being spent. When we ask, the only answer we get is that Harris is dealing only with the US Defense Department while it is all Iraqi money," he said at a press conference.

[...]

He charged that the network's budget was being wasted on costly foreign programs and that the sub-contracting process had left no room for local know-how.

Al-Mashta cited the LBCI's "Al-Mumayazun" Game Show which is costing Al-Iraqiya 28,000 dollars per show, while he estimated that a similar program could be shot in Iraq for around 3,000 dollars.

"The fact is that the government is not paying a penny to the network, despite the fact that I talked to officials about that more than once. I didn't receive my salary for five consecutive months," he also complained.

"This means more Iraqi money will be spent in vain instead of being spent on building the country. It also means that Iraqi skills are being treated with contempt," he added to explain his resignation.

[...]

Could you give an example of how the Coalition influenced your content?

They came with ideas for one or two programs which we felt were not really good ideas. But we were told, "You should have [them] whether you like it or not." One of the programs was about law. It was funny because the American supervisor of the Ministry of Justice wished to have this program on IMN and we--I mean, to have a weekly program about law when there are no courts and no really functioning law in the country--we felt that this was a really stupid idea. So, I was hosting the first episode with four judges and one lawyer, and they all agreed on the program that there were no courts and no functioning law. So then we thought, what's the second part of the show going to be about?

[...]

A ride to the airport these days, he was told, can cost up to $6000. (That's not a typo.)

[...]

Two SUVs were carrying private security contractors who work for Blackwater Security Consulting. (In April, four Blackwater employees were killed in Fallujah; the bodies of two of them were burnt by mobs and hung from a bridge.) A van came flying down an access road and pulled alongside the lead SUV. The door to van opened and machine-gun fire blasted the SUV, which came to a halt. The rear SUV was forced to a stop. A pitched battle ensued, with the Blackwater employees firing back until the fuel tanks of their vehicles exploded. At least three Blackwater employees were killed. My source says he was told four were killed. (There was little media coverage of this incident.) And all the insurgents escaped. "This was in the afternoon!" my friend exclaimed. "Nothing stops them from attacking. Nothing stops them from getting away....There must have been at least fifteen of them, pulling off a classic L-ambush. Now what does this tell the Iraqi people? That the Americans cannot secure a small stretch of highway. It runs straight from the airport to the entrance of the Green Zone. And it's not secure. That says it all."

[...]

Offstage, beforehand, Rove and Bush had had their library tours. According to two eyewitnesses, Rove had shown keen interest in everything he saw, and asked questions, including about costs, obviously thinking about a future George W Bush library and legacy. "You're not such a scary guy," joked his guide. "Yes, I am," Rove replied. Walking away, he muttered deliberately and loudly: "I change constitutions, I put churches in schools ..." Thus he identified himself as more than the ruthless campaign tactician; he was also the invisible hand of power, pervasive and expansive, designing to alter the fundamental American compact.

[...]

Bush appeared distracted, and glanced repeatedly at his watch. When he stopped to gaze at the river, where secret service agents were stationed in boats, the guide said: "Usually, you might see some bass fishermen out there." Bush replied: "A submarine could take this place out."

Was the president warning of an al-Qaida submarine, sneaking undetected up the Mississippi, through the locks and dams of the Arkansas river, surfacing under the bridge to the 21st century to dispatch the Clinton library? Is that where Osama bin Laden is hiding?

Or was this a wishful paranoid fantasy of ubiquitous terrorism destroying Clinton's legacy with one blow? Or a projection of menace and messianism, with only Bush grasping the true danger, standing between submerged threat and civilisation? Perhaps it was simply his way of saying he wouldn't build his library near water.

At the private luncheon afterwards, in a heated tent pitched behind the library, Shimon Peres delivered a heartfelt toast to Clinton's perseverance in pursuing the Middle East peace process. Upon entering the tent, Bush, according to an eyewitness, told an aide: "One gulp and we're out of here." He had informed the Clintons he would stay through the lunch, but by the time Peres arose with wine glass in hand the president was gone.

They occupied and ransacked buildings, taking with them anything worth keeping including uniforms, weapons, radios and police cars.

The attacks caused the police force to collapse. The chief of police has left his job.

US commanders estimate that more than three quarters of local policemen are no longer showing up for work.

[...]

The attacks on police stations punched a hole through the US strategy for Mosul.

US forces had wanted to take a back seat in policing and controlling this city. They wanted Iraqi forces to do the job themselves.

[...]

Many of the US troops in Mosul have only been here for about a month.

Few have learned more than a few words of Arabic. Few have any direct contact with the local population.

[...]

This is the city where US forces killed the sons of Saddam.

Last year the Americans thought they had fought off their enemies and freed Mosul for good.

But now the city is back under nightly curfew. Many Iraqis still live amid fear and uncertainty.

And the Americans have found their way into another fight.

[...]

U.S. military said that 11 of the 35 bodies found have been identified as members of the Iraqi security forces, who have been targeted by insurgents. The others have not been identified.

[...]

Meanwhile, Iraqi forces arrested four insurgents who said they were planning attacks against coalition bases and police stations in the southern city of Basra, officials said Friday, a day after a joint British-Iraqi operation netted three dozen men in the area.

Iraqi National Guardsmen arrested the four after a brief gunfight at the Al-Yarmouk Hotel. Three of the men came from Fallujah and the fourth from Samarra, according to an Iraqi National Guard official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The four men told Iraqi officials they were planning a series of attacks in southern Basra, which is the headquarters for some 8,500 British troops, in an attempt to relieve the U.S. military pressure on Fallujah.

[...]

In Fallujah, insurgents ambushed U.S. troops as they entered a home during house-to-house searches in the former rebel bastion, killing two Marines and wounding three others, the U.S. military said Friday.

Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, commanding general of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said the Marines responded with gunfire, killing three rebels hiding inside.

[...]

China is the second-largest foreign holder of U.S. notes. The country's central bank declined to comment on the report that it had reduced its holdings.

[...]

China reduced its U.S. Treasury note holdings to $180 billion, China Business News said. Yu said in his statement that he knew "nothing about the actions that (the State Administration of Foreign Exchange) has taken and will take.''

[...]

DaimlerChrysler AG, the world's fifth-largest carmaker, said the dollar's decline against the euro will reduce the earnings of the Mercedes-Benz luxury car division.

"We weren't prepared for the dollar to be at this level,'' Thomas Weber, the management board member responsible for research, told journalists at a dinner in Frankfurt yesterday. "It will influence the results at Mercedes and 2005 won't be an easy year.''

[...]

President Bush last week ordered the CIA director to increase by 50 percent the number of intelligence analysts and officers in the clandestine unit as part of a push to strengthen U.S. intelligence operations.

[...]

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Yellow Dog Democrats, the few of us who are left, are liberals. I can just see Pat Robertson curling his lips and snarling with disdain, "Liberals." Nowadays, it is not fashionable to be considered a liberal. The right wing has done a yeoman's job in making people salivate, like Pavlov's dog, when they hear the word "liberal." Yet, being a liberal isn't half bad. To my mind, it's a heck of a lot better than being a Republican.

[...]

Give me a bunch of liberals any day of the week. Give me a bunch of Yellow Dog Democrats eight days a week, thirteen months a year. Unrestrained capitalism has had its days. What has it brought us? An internal economy in shambles, political dictatorship, lack of social services, and, worst of all, the beginnings of a war that might very well be the gateway to another Dark Age in the history of the world.

[John Brand is a Purple Heart, Combat Infantry veteran of World War II. He received his Juris Doctor degree at Northwestern University and a Master of Theology and a Doctor of Ministry at Southern Methodist University. He served as a Methodist minister for 19 years, was Vice President, Birkman & Associates, Industrial Psychologists, and concluded his career as Director, Organizational and Human Resources, Warren-King Enterprises, an independent oil and gas company...]

[...]

But more importantly, they say that they ran a similar examination on the voting patterns in Ohio, comparing its paper ballot and electronic results, and found absolutely nothing to suggest either candidate got any “bump” that couldn’t otherwise be explained by past voting patterns, income, turnout, or any other commonplace factor.

[...]

Iraq's child malnutrition rate now roughly equals that of Burundi, a central African nation torn by more than a decade of war. It is far higher than rates in Uganda and Haiti.

[...]

Mehdi and other analysts attributed the increase in malnutrition to dirty water and to unreliable supplies of the electricity needed to make it safe by boiling. In poorer areas, where people rely on kerosene to fuel their stoves, high prices and an economy crippled by unemployment aggravate poor health.

"Things have been worse for me since the war," said Kasim Said, a day laborer who was at Baghdad's main children's hospital to visit his ailing year-old son, Abdullah. The child, lying on a pillow with a Winnie the Pooh washcloth to keep the flies off his head, weighs just 11 pounds.

"During the previous regime, I used to work on the government projects. Now there are no projects," his father said.

When he finds work, he added, he can bring home $10 to $14 a day. If his wife is fortunate enough to find a can of Isomil, the nutritional supplement that doctors recommend, she pays $7 for it.

"But the lady in the next bed said she just paid $10," said Suad Ahmed, who sat cross-legged on a bed in the same ward, trying to console her skeletal 4-month-old granddaughter, Hiba, who suffers from chronic diarrhea.

Iraqi health officials like to surprise visitors by pointing out that the nutrition issue facing young Iraqis a generation ago was obesity.

[...]

International aid efforts and the U.N. oil-for-food program helped reduce the ruinous impact of sanctions, and the rate of acute malnutrition among the youngest Iraqis gradually dropped from a peak of 11 percent in 1996 to 4 percent in 2002. But the invasion in March 2003 and the widespread looting in its aftermath severely damaged the basic structures of governance in Iraq, and persistent violence across the country slowed the pace of reconstruction almost to a halt.

[...]

"Believe me, we thought a magic thing would happen" with the fall of Hussein and the start of the U.S.-led occupation, said an administrator at Baghdad's Central Teaching Hospital for Pediatrics. "So we're surprised that nothing has been done. And people talk now about how the days of Saddam were very nice," the official said.

[...]

U.S. and Western observers say the second round run-off presidential vote fell far short of international standards.

Washington warned of punitive measures if the Kiev leadership failed to investigate allegations of vote rigging and the European Union described the vote as "fraudulent."

[...]

The IAEA's safeguards regime was to be transformed, thereby, from a quantitative system – focused on accounting for declared materials and monitoring of declared activities – to a qualitative system, capable of forming a comprehensive picture of a state's nuclear and nuclear-related activities, including all nuclear-related imports and exports.

Each Additional Protocol also provides the IAEA the authority to visit any of the signatory's facilities to investigate questions about – or inconsistencies in – the signatory's nuclear declarations.

Iran signed an Additional Protocol to its Safeguards agreement and immediately invited the IAEA to conduct the exhaustive two-year inspection of Iran's nuclear and nuclear-related activities just completed.

Result?

As was the case with Iraq in the months immediately preceding Bush's invasion, the IAEA has found no evidence that NPT-proscribed materials have been stolen or diverted, nor that Iran is engaged in any NPT-prohibited activity. In particular, there is no evidence that Iran has been enriching uranium in the facilities it has constructed or is constructing.

[...]

[If] Bush-Cheney can get the Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran – or worse – in spite of the no-nuke report by the IAEA, the NPT-IAEA nuke proliferation-prevention regime may be dealt a fatal blow.

This week retiring Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared to be developing a rationale for launching – or condoning – a Bush preemptive attack against Iran, just as he did just before Bush launched his preemptive attack against Iraq.

Blindfolded detainees are seen next to stolen artifacts following their arrest in the southern city of Basra, November 22, 2004. A gang of four Iranians and seven Iraqis was captured in a Basra hotel on Monday after finding stolen artifacts in their room, which later on they admitted that they were planning to smuggle out of the country. Iraqi police said they will hold them until the investigation is over.

[...]

It has to be acknowledged, however, that you would be hard pressed to find a financial analyst who believes Snow is capable of this level of sophistication. After his performance in London last week, one said: "I would sell the currency of any country of which he was the finance minister." The likelihood is that even if the Americans were to use the Europeans as a proxy, the Chinese would still resist.

[...]

The US is happy to go it alone for now, since this is the forex equivalent of the quick push to Baghdad. Life is likely to get tougher later.

[...]

Residents outside the city said the US forces let a relief team to enter the city on Sunday, but later they opened fire at the convoy, killing one member of the team and forcing them to withdrawamid growing fears of human crisis in Fallujah.

"Marines from the 1st Marine Division shot and killed an insurgent who while faking dead opened fire on the marines who were conducting a security and clearing patrol through the streets," a military statement said.

[...]

Military sources had said that the rules of engagement were looser during the operation launched in Fallujah, for fear that rebels would be disguised, fake death or wear suicide explosives belts.

The US military and Iraqi government troops are still carrying house-to-house searches in the rebel bastion but two weeks after it was launched, the largest post-Saddam military operation in Iraq is all but over.

[...]

The cleric was a member of influential Iraqi Muslim body the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), and the brother of the organisation's spokesman in Baghdad, Muhammad Bashar al-Faidhi.

The AMS has called for a boycott of elections planned for 30 January. It says its members have been targeted by US and Iraqi security forces and also by armed fighters trying to fuel sectarian unrest.

[...]

Also in Mosul, four bodies, at least three of them Iraqi soldiers, were found in the past 24 hours by the US military, a US army officer said on Monday.

"We found them at 2300 (2000 GMT on Sunday). They had been dead for at least a couple of hours and their bodies set against the sidewalk, shot in the head and hands tied," Lieutenant Colonel Michael Kurilla said, adding that three of them were confirmed as being Iraqi soldiers.

Police said seven died on Saturday while the military said three.

"The driver ignored verbal warning and several warning shots," the military said in a statement.

"As US marines in the vicinity of the checkpoint attempted to disable the van, the van accelerated toward the marines. The marines then fired upon the vehicle to protect themselves and the integrity of the checkpoint."

Shooting broke out when an advance party of the interim interior minister's security detail came upon a civilian vehicle whose occupants they felt were behaving suspiciously, the source said.

It is not clear who fired first, but the Iraqi driver of the vehicle and one of minister Falah al-Naqib's guards were killed and another bodyguard wounded.

[...]

Questioned sharply by fellow Republicans as well as Democrats, Stevens pleaded with the Senate to approve the overall spending bill despite the tax returns language.

But Sen. Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota, said that wasn't good enough. "It becomes the law of the land on the signature of the president of the United States. That's wrong."

Conrad said the measure's presence in the spending bill was symptomatic of a broader problem -- Congress writing legislation hundreds of pages long and then giving lawmakers only a few hours to review it before having to vote on it.

[...]

Some Democrats didn't accept the assertion that the provision was a mistake and demanded an investigation.

"We weren't born yesterday, we didn't come down with the first snow," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California. "This isn't poorly thought out, this was very deliberately thought out and it was done in the dead of night."

[...]

Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said the measure will "bring us back to the doorstep to the days of President Nixon, President Truman and other dark days in our history when taxpayer information was used against political enemies."

[...]

[...]

The Republicans are acting like it was all an innocent mistake. And it seems clear that there are Republican senators who didn't know anytihng about it and are pissed. But clearly this was no accident, unless provisions have started to write themselves.

[...]

Apparently the provision was placed into the bill at the request of Rep. Istook of Oklahoma. (post)

Let me share with you the administration's thoughts about what's taking place in Venezuela. It remains a somewhat fluid situation. But yesterday's events in Venezuela resulted in a change in the government and the assumption of a transitional authority until new elections can be held.

The details still are unclear. We know that the action encouraged by the Chavez government provoked this crisis. According to the best information available, the Chavez government suppressed peaceful demonstrations. Government supporters, on orders from the Chavez government, fired on unarmed, peaceful protestors, resulting in 10 killed and 100 wounded. The Venezuelan military and the police refused to fire on the peaceful demonstrators and refused to support the government's role in such human rights violations. The government also tried to prevent independent news media from reporting on these events.

The results of these events are now that President Chavez has resigned the presidency. Before resigning, he dismissed the vice president and the cabinet, and a transitional civilian government has been installed. This government has promised early elections.

The United States will continue to monitor events. That is what took place, and the Venezuelan people expressed their right to peaceful protest. It was a very large protest that turned out. And the protest was met with violence.

[...]

Top secret documents recently obtained and posted on www.venezuelafoia.info show that in the weeks prior to the April 2002 coup against President Chavez, the CIA had full knowledge of the events to occur and, in fact, even had the detailed plans in their possession.

An April 6, 2002, top secret intelligence brief headlining “Venezuela: Conditions Ripening for Coup Attempt,” states: “Dissident military factions, including some disgruntled senior officers and a group of radical junior officers, are stepping up efforts to organize a coup against President Chávez, possible as early as this month, [CENSORED]. The level of detail in the reported plans -­ [CENSORED] targets Chavez and ten other senior officers for arrest…” The document further states “to provoke military action, the plotters may try to exploit unrest stemming from opposition demonstrations slated for later this month…”

So the CIA knew that a coup attempt would take place soon after April 6, 2002, and moreover, they knew the plan would include Chavez’ arrest and an exploitation of violence in the opposition march. In other words, they knew the plans before the coup occurred and surely they knew the actors involved, many of whose names are probably in the censored parts of the top-secret documents.

One could assume that if the CIA had the detailed plans in their possession in the weeks prior to the coup it was because they were associating and conspiring with the coup plotters.

So, when Ari Fleischer and Philip Reeker made those statements on April 12, 2002, on behalf of the US government, they did so with full knowledge that a coup had taken place, Chavez had been arrested and the violence in the opposition march, which they attributed to Chavez, had actually been a premeditated part of the coup plot. The top secret documents that prove this information show they were sent to the US State Department and the National Security Agency ... which means frankly, the White House knew what was happening all along.

[...]

Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said Falluja remained too dangerous to secure proper retrieval and burial of corpses.

[...]

"The city is still suffering shortage of public services. There is no water or electricity. There is no way to offer medical treatment for the injured families still surrounded inside the city," he added.

[...]

As onlookers stood in line to hear the traditional prayers for the dead, the preacher also called for revenge on Americans and their Iraqi allies, who believe the assault on Falluja has "broken the back" of the Sunni Muslim insurgency.

"We ask you God to be merciful," the preacher chanted.

"Shake the earth beneath the feet of the Americans, shake the earth beneath the feet of the Crusaders, shake the earth beneath the feet of the hypocrites that help them.

"God grant victory to Iraq."

[...]

"The enemy can dress as a woman, the enemy can be faking to be dead," said one company commander to his marines before entering the heart of the city. "So shoot everything that moves and everything that doesn't move," he said.

The photographer embedded with this unit, which carried out some of the most dangerous missions on the frontlines of the Falluja battle, said the rules of engagement were gradually modified as the situation evolved.

"A marine was killed when a unit entered a house. They pulled out and dynamited the building, but when they moved back in, an arm stuck out from under the rubble and threw a grenade," he said.

The photographer, who did not wish to identify his unit, said the fear of human bombers combined with the discovery that fighters were taking amphetamines and adrenaline prompted his platoon to take new measures.

"From that point on, the rule was the so-called 'double tap': two bullets in every body," he said.

The night before the assault began, the order came down that troops could shoot any male on the street between the ages of 15 and 50 if they were viewed as a security threat, regardless of whether they had a weapon.

When marines asked a gunnery sergeant for clarification, he told his men if they saw any military-aged males on the street "Drop 'em."

[...]

After one marine was killed and five were wounded on the second day of the assault, the military command ordered platoons to spray homes with machine-gun and tank fire before entering them, in an effort to kill members of the resistance lurking inside waiting for them.

[...]

Rebel snipers fire on search parties eager to stabilise Falluja after seizing control. Some houses are booby-trapped. Some weapons are hidden behind paintings, in air conditioning units and in couches -- and the arms supply seems endless.

[...]

"We found policemen with mortars and mines and surface-to-air missiles. What policeman do you know that needs that?" said 2nd Lieutenant James Collins, 23, of Jamesville, North Carolina.

[...]

A Bush-supporting US congressman, whose name I sorely regret having missed, had no doubt his finest moment when he told CNN that among the many benefits Fallujans would reap from this heraldic harvest of blood and concrete was 'the tremendous number of jobs' they were going to get when the rebuilding of the city begins. (Bet you never thought of that antidote to unemployment, Mr Patterson - flatten downtown Kingston and then rebuild it!)

[...]

Among the questions that the [Senate Finance Committee] chairman, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, should pursue: Why wasn't Vioxx withdrawn from the market as early as 2000, when some researchers discovered that it doubled a patient's risk of suffering a heart attack? When Merck notified the FDA in 2000 of a potential problem, why didn't the agency quickly order a trial to assess the risks?

Also, in the face of mounting evidence that Vioxx caused harm, why did the FDA approve the drug for use in children in August, only a month before it was pulled from the market? And were Merck executives reluctant to confront the problem due to the company's reliance on the drug's worldwide annual sales of $2.5 billion?

[...]

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the chief Senate GOP negotiator, said she was disappointed that Bush's support of the compromise — which he expressed via White House statements and telephone calls to a few House Republicans — wasn't enough to obtain its passage. "It's surprising," she said...

[...]

The Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School yesterday offered to allow Santorum to enroll the children without the tuition provided he pick up the technology costs.

"PA Cyber stands behind the Santorum children," Nick Trombetta, the school's CEO, said in a statement. "We made a commitment to the Santorum family. ... We have no intention of abandoning that commitment."

[...]

Another U.S. officer in Mosul, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Gibler, told Reuters on Friday several headless and dismembered bodies had been found earlier in the week near a police station in northeastern Mosul and were thought to be those of policemen killed by insurgents who sacked the station.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) slammed the "utter contempt" for humanity shown by all sides in Iraq amid fierce fighting in Falluja.

Residents who fled the city gathered at a cemetery near the town of al-Saqlawiya, north of Falluja, in an attempt to identify the bodies. The Central Committee for Relief Aid transported the corpses by truck to the cemetery.

Fighting continues in Falluja, despite claims by US marines that they have wiped out "insurgents".

[...]

"As hostilities continue in Falluja and elsewhere, every day seems to bring news of yet another act of utter contempt for the most basic tenet of humanity: the obligation to protect human life and dignity," he said.

"For the parties to this conflict, complying with international humanitarian law is an obligation, not an option," Kraehenbuehl said in an unusually tough statement by the relief agency.

[W]hile 10 days of fighting had deprived fighters a safe haven, a spokesman for interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi conceded that many of the city's resistance had dispersed, posing threats elsewhere that US and Iraqi authorities would have to counter.

Furthermore, a report leaked to The New York Times, quoting US marine officers in Falluja, warned of the outstanding resilience of fighters opposed to the presence of foreign troops in Iraq.

Fighters would continue to disrupt efforts to set up reliable Iraqi security forces and to hold an election in late January, the marine intelligence report was quoted as saying.

That would put pressure on US forces, who have already had to return troops from Falluja to other northern and western areas where some in the once dominant Sunni Muslim minority fear elections will hand power to Iraq's Shia majority.

[...]

"They have been saying that Falluja is the source of and therefore the solution to their problems. The violence in Mosul has shown that to be a crassly stupid thing to say," Toby Dodge, an Iraq analyst at Queen Mary University of London, said.

"Insurgency is a national phenomenon fuelled by alienation. I don't think this war is winnable because they have alienated the base of support across Iraqi society."

[...]

Meanwhile, attacks on US forces and Iraqi police continued unabated throughout Iraq.

The bodies of nine purported members of the Iraqi National Guard have been found in Mosul, where clashes between the troops, supported by US forces, and armed fighters continued for a third day.

[...]

The men, discovered in an industrial area not far from the scene of some of the worst clashes in Mosul, appeared to have been executed, as they all had a bullet in the head and their bodies were also badly burned.

Three Iraqi policemen have been killed in heavy fighting out between armed fighters and Iraqi National Guards supported by US troops in western Baghdad.

[...]

An Iraqi journalist in the area, Ziad Badruldin, told Aljazeera that he saw the al-Aadhamiya police station up in flames.

Badruldin, however, also said there are reports that the three were killed when their car was set ablaze near the al-Aadhamiya bridge.

Clashes, the reporter said, had also occurred in Antar Square. Other confrontations occurred in al-Gazaliya, al-Amariya and Haifa Street.

Badruldin said he saw destroyed US vehicles near the Abu Hanifa mosque.

Aljazeera aired video of a US armoured vehicle, believed to be a Hummer, destroyed by armed fighters in the clashes. Its occupants are believed to have been killed, but there has been no comment from US military authorities on the incident.

[...]

Another Iraqi journalist Ziad al-Samarrai told Aljazeera that fierce clashes were spreading to other districts of the city including al-Dura.

[...]

In related incidents, two blasts rocked Baghdad on Saturday morning.

[...]

Aljazeera has also learned that an unknown armed group shot and killed an advisor to the interim Iraqi Ministry of Works and Public Affairs on Saturday in Baghdad.

Dr Amal Abd al-Hamid, her secretary, driver and bodyguard were all killed in the attack in the al-Qadisiyah neighbourhood.

Also on Saturday, five students were detained by Iraqi police at the Technology University of Baghdad. The arrest came in the wake of a demonstration at the university which called for an end to the "massacres and atrocities" committed in Falluja.

A group of national, political and religious groups in Iraq, including the Association of Muslim Scholars, have decided to boycott the elections due to be held early next year.

[Lieutenant General Lance Smith, deputy commander of the US Central Command] Smith also dropped hints that elections may not be held in Falluja.

"And so it could be that even without, say, a city like Falluja voting, that there will be adequate representation by the Sunnis to feel or look like it was legitimate representation for all the parties involved."

[...]

The United States plans to extend tours of duty of more troops in Iraq to increase force levels through January elections, a top US general has said.

[...]

Smith...said on Friday that additional troops may also be deployed if necessary to secure the country before the vote.

"We are talking mainly about extending some units," Smith said. "We will make further assessment as we get a little bit closer and understand what the impact of Falluja has been in the entire country."

[...]

[...]

Five people were wounded in addition to the three deaths and roughly 40 arrests, according to members of the congregation. The U.S. military referred questions on the raid to the Iraqi government, which declined comment.

The mosque, built around the tomb of the founder of the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence, has stood for 1250 years. When Hulagu sacked Baghdad in 1257, he used it to stable his horses, but otherwise it has escaped indignities from the many forces that have invaded Baghdad. It is the most important Sunni mosque in Baghdad, and a site of pilgrimage for Muslims worldwide.

American troops have raided the mosque repeatedly since the fall of Baghdad in April 2003.

[...]

Few Shiite clerics have condemned the Fallujah operation except for followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militia battled American troops in two major campaigns this year. On Friday, U.S. troops arrested an al-Sadr representative near the holy city of Karbala — the second arrest of his aides in two days, al-Sadr's office said. Both had spoken out against the Fallujah attack, which began last week.

[...]

U.S. troops also raided a Sunni mosque in Qaim, near the Syrian border, a cleric said Friday, calling it retaliation for opposing the Fallujah offensive. Imam Maudafar Abdul Wahab said his mosque was gathering food and supplies for Fallujah, and that the Americans took about $2,000 worth of Iraqi currency meant for mosque repairs.

[...]

The documents included a specific warhead design based on implosion and adjustments aimed at outfitting the warhead on existing Iranian missile systems.

[...]

If the new data is confirmed, it would mean the Islamic republic is further along than previously known in developing a nuclear weapon and the means to deliver it.

[...]

This campaign, I would argue, is one of the last convulsions of angry, real American men, fighting desperately (and well) to hold back the time and tide of the new—the un-white and un-Christian, and girlie-men, too, who sooner or later will be America. Bush has the Father Knows Best vote, from men who have lost their personal power and hate what is happening all around them.

The assessment, distributed to senior Marine and Army officers in Iraq (news - web sites), also said that despite the heavy fighting with coalition forces, the insurgents would continue to increase in number, carrying out attacks and fomenting unrest in the area.

One officer said the seven-page classified report -- parts of which were provided to Thursday's edition of The New York Times -- was "brutally honest" and appears to contradict the US government's victorious account of the US-led fight against insurgents in Fallujah and other parts of northern Iraq.

[...]

Insurgents fired 10 mortar rounds at the governor's office in Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, setting ablaze a fuel tanker parked nearby, a U.S. military spokeswoman said.

[...]

Rebels also fired six mortar rounds at a U.S. military base in Mosul, but there were no injuries.

[...]

Seizing their first objective, teams of rifle-toting engineers crouched behind cover and pointed M-16s in all directions. One man produced a pry bar, another a sturdy shovel. Together they heaved up a sewer cover.

[...]

During a lull, one gravelly voice broke the silence, "Does the word `apocalyptic' apply?"

[...]

The "international" part ensures that, by force of law, US judges could not be guided by the Geneva Conventions or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, even if the US is a signatory.

This bill, like the theocrat bills that preceded it, and those in the works, have received virtually NO attention from the press, mainstream, progressive, or otherwise.

[...]

Signers are given the form "simply to inform and educate them about the sensitivity of that information and the need to protect it. . . . It does not do anything to further obscure or shroud that information," she said.

But congressional critics and government watchdog organizations such as the Federation of American Scientists call the policy a potentially precedent-setting expansion of official secrecy whose provisions are overly broad and unworkable, if not unconstitutional.

Continue reading...

[...]

If the U.S. forces would call a temporary cease-fire ”we could get our trucks in and get the civilians left in Fallujah who need medical care, we could get them out,” he said.

Mosques have organised massive collections of food and relief supplies for Fallujah residents as they did last April when the city was under attack, but these supplies have not been allowed into the city either.

[...]

The situation within Fallujah is grim, he said. If help does not reach people soon, ”the children who are trapped will most likely die.”

He said the Ministry of Health in the U.S.-backed interim Iraqi government had stopped supplying hospitals and clinics in Fallujah two months before the current siege.

[...]

"We are conducting research and are testing the most up-to-date nuclear missile systems, which, I'm sure, will be supplied to the armed forces in the near future," Putin was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency.

"What is even more important, these systems will have no analogues in the other nuclear powers during the next few years."

[...]

Although there is no indication that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Sugarland is going to be indicted, the House Republican Conference decided Wednesday that a party committee of several dozen members would review any felony indictment against a party leader and then recommend whether the leader should step aside.

[...]

U.S. soldiers battled an insurgent uprising in Tal Afar in early September and said they had secured the area after killing dozens of fighters, many of whom were believed to have entered from Syria.

The attacks breaking out across northern Iraq underscore a growing problem for U.S. forces: namely, that battlefield victories can be quickly undermined after the Americans leave and weaker Iraqi security forces are left to keep the area.

“Get off your f&^%ing ass, put my wife in a car, and go get her a watch,” Crum is alleged to have told Camille Geha, the sales manager at Khalifa Hilton resort in Kuwait, in early 2004. Aware that the company was spending up to $1.5 million a month at the hotel, Geha is said to have told an unnamed embassy staffer that he had a jewelry store at the Marina Mall opened in the middle of the night to get a new watch.

[...]

The internal embassy communications also portray Richard Jones, the U.S. ambassador to Kuwait, as anxiously pushing the Texas-based company to buy overpriced fuel from a specific company, Altanmia Commercial Marketing Company. Altanmia officials counter that KBR staff were deliberately undermining their bids.

The collection of documents, including e-mails, memos and reports were released to the media by California Representative Henry Waxman, to top ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Government Reform. They are only a small part of over 400 internal documents delivered to the committee, which wields oversight of U.S. contracts relating to Iraq.

[...]

Related allegations made by Altanmia officers in the newly released embassy documents also include:
– KBR officers solicited bribes openly and “that anyone visiting their seaside villas at the Kuwaiti Hilton who offers to provide services will be asked for a bribe.”

– A senior level Iraqi employee of KBR was fired in August 2003 for complaining to company managers about corruption.

– KBR managers conspired to sabotage Altanmia’s ability to fulfill a contract so that the agreement could be reassigned to another company willing to pay a bribe.

– KBR trucks were being used to “backhaul” stolen crude oil out of Iraq for personal gain.

– The wife of a KBR senior executive received a watch valued at well over $20,000 (8,000 Kuwaiti dinars) in appreciation from a real estate company that was receiving rent at twice the market value from KBR for office space. (This allegation overlaps with the story of Tom Crum’s wife but is significantly different, although it may be one incident reported incorrectly by a second source).

[...]

KBR also apparently discharged employees earlier this year working at Camp Anaconda in Iraq believed to be involved in wrongdoing. In postings on the Web blog called “A Minute Longer – A Soldier’s Tale,” one former procurement manager, Laszlo Tibold, is accused of awarding a gravel contract at five times the price of a competing offer. Another posting claimed that KBR’s contracting department at Camp Anaconda was getting kickbacks.

A March 12 posting then announces:

“Mr. Tibold has since been fired for his contract writings there at Camp Anaconda, along with some of his buddies. However their contracts still remain and we continue to pay against them.”

[...]

It's easy to blame the poor for being poor. It's easy to believe that the world is being caught up in an escalating spiral of terrorism and war. That's what allows George Bush to say, "You're either with us or with the terrorists." But that's a spurious choice. Terrorism is only the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketeers of war. They believe that the legitimate use of violence is not the sole prerogative of the state.

It is mendacious to make moral distinction between the unspeakable brutality of terrorism and the indiscriminate carnage of war and occupation. Both kinds of violence are unacceptable. We cannot support one and condemn the other.

[...]

"Gonzales picked one battle in particular to doggedly fight: that the president and those working closely with him must be able to receive counsel from advisers without public inquiry. Gonzales argued throughout the summer of 2002 that Vice President Cheney and the records of his energy policy task force should not be subject to open-government laws."

[...]

One interesting item the report found from Gonzales' time in Texas: "Gonzales was instrumental in getting Bush excused from jury duty in 1996 -- a move that allowed the governor to avoid having to disclose that he had been arrested for drunken driving in Maine in 1976, the Houston Chronicle reported.

[...]

About 1200 US troops moved in to Mosul on Tuesday after large groups of anti-US fighters took over police stations in the city in the past few days.

[...]

"The operation has been launched," said Stuart Williams, a US military officer. "Two battalions are sweeping from the west side to the east."

Nasir Ayif was taken into custody in the northwestern Jamiah neighbourhood in response to the party's opposition to the US-led offensive on Falluja, party official Iyad al-Samarrai said.

[...]

Last week, the Iraqi Islamic Party, one of the strongest Sunni political parties in the country, had withdrawn from the interim government to protest against the US assault on Falluja, saying it "has led and will lead to more killings and genocide without mercy from the Americans."

[...]

"This action is a kind of punishment to the Islamic Party because we object to what is happening in Iraq, especially Falluja, and to the security policies adopted by the Americans and the Iraqi government," al-Samarrai was quoted as saying.

He told Aljazeera these kinds of arrests were always carried out "under the pretext of possession of weapons and explosives or carrying out anti-US actions".

He reportedly told colleagues earlier that he would probably leave because of his personal finances and job stresses.

[...]

CNN also reports that Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage will be leaving the administration as well. Armitage was sworn in on March 26, 2001 and reportedly handed in his resignation Monday.

Samarra
‘Water and electricity [were] cut off’ during the assault on Samarra on Friday 1
October 2004, according to Knight Ridder Newspapers and the Independent.
The Washington Post explicitly blames ‘U.S. forces’ for this.

Fallujah
On 16 October the Washington Post reported that:
‘Electricity and water were cut off to the city [Fallujah] just as a fresh wave of strikes
began Thursday night, an action that U.S. forces also took at the start of assaults on
Najaf and Samarra.’

Residents of Fallujah have told the UN’s Integrated Regional Information
Networks that ‘they had no food or clean water and did not have time to store
enough to hold out through the impending battle’. The water shortage has
been confirmed by other civilians fleeing Fallujahxiv, Fadhil Badrani, a BBC
journalist in Falluja, confirmed on 8 November that ‘the water supply has been cut
off’.

Other cases
There have been allegations that the water supply was cut off during the assault
on Najaf in August 2004, and during the invasion of Basra in 2003. We have not
investigated these claims.
Continue reading (pdf)...

The incident played out as the Marines 3rd Battalion, 1st Regiment, returned to the unidentified Fallujah mosque Saturday. Sites was embedded with the unit.

According to Blumenkrantz, Gerred cited the use of a photograph of Richard Nixon that contained the satirical caption, “I am not a crook,” and the use of a paragraph of an article containing Vice President Dick Cheney’s name to demonstrate how to align type on a page.

[...]

Blumenkrantz said that when Gerred presented his concerns, he attempted to engage Gerred in a discussion and resolve the issue. When Gerred persisted, the two immediately took the matter to the chair of the Journalism Department, Blumenkrantz said.

The three discussed various issues, including the monitoring of a classroom by a student not enrolled in the class, and a professor’s right to free speech, Blumenkrantz said.

[...]

Gerred, a finance and real estate major, said he attended Blumenkrantz’s class because he had heard the instructor was making inappropriate, negative comments toward President George W. Bush, and wanted to witness it for himself. He said he has dealt with teachers in his own classes who have openly voiced their political views in class, including a particular geography course. He would ask the geography instructor not to make political comments in his presence, Gerred said.

Horowitz, the head of the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture, and the conservative women at the Washington, DC-based Independent Women's Forum are focusing their homeland security spying on a much more specific target, liberal academics. Together Horowitz and the IWF have been cranking out advertisements and placing them in a number of student newspapers across the country encouraging conservative students to scan their campuses for so-called anti-American academics.

[...]

On September 27, David Gibbs told Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now! that his largely freshmen class "focuses on propaganda and deception," and he "emphasize[s] incidents of the government lying and things like that." When he taught the class last spring, "the Independent Women's Forum... put into the local student newspaper, an advertisement that basically argued that there's a kind of left wing domination of the universities and students should fight that with the strong implication they should monitor their professors and report them, at least that's how I read it."

When Gibbs received student evaluations, "a student who said I'm anti-American communist who hates America and is trying to brainwash young people into thinking that America sucks," said that "I should be investigated by the FBI, and the FBI has been contacted."

Later on, "another student on a web log during the summer said he took my class and also said that he didn't like my politics and suggests that students shouldn't take my class but should drop by and try to disrupt it. There have been a number of instances like that which I hadn't had before."

[...]

I don't think serious education is possible in America. Anything you touch in the annals of knowledge is a foe of this system of commerce and profit, run amok. The only education that can be permitted is if it acculturates to the status quo, as happens in the expensive schools, or if it produces people to police and enforce the status quo, as in the state school where I teach. Significantly, at my school, which is a third-tier university, servicing working-class, first-generation college graduates who enter lower-etchelon jobs in the civil service, education, or middle management, the favored academic concentrations are communications, criminal justice, and social work--basically how to mystify, cage, and control the masses.

This education is a vast waste of the resources and potential of the young. It is boring beyond belief and useless--except to the powers and interests that depend on it.

[...]

But the detritus and debris that American education has become is both planned and instrumental. It's why our media succeeds in telling lies. It's why our secretary of state can quote from a graduate-student paper, claiming confidently that the stolen data came from the highest intelligence sources. It's why Picasso's "Guernica" can be covered up during his preposterous "report" to the UN without anyone guessing the political significance of this gesture and the fascist sensibility that it protects.

[...]

One of the infamous and telling reforms the Pinochet regime implemented was educational reform. The basic goal was to end the university's role as a source of social criticism and political opposition.

[...]

Critics charge that the bill is dangerous-a direct affront to the First Amendment and the product of intrigue by a small clique of individuals and organizations which combines the forces of the powerful Israeli lobby in official Washington.

Leading the push for Senate approval of the bill are the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith, run by Abe Foxman, the American Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee.

Also lending its support is Empower America, the neo-conservative front group established by William Kristol, editor and publisher of billionaire Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard, which is said to be the "intellectual" journal that governs the train of foreign policy thinking in the Bush administration.

[...]

H.R. 3077 is bureaucratic in its tone, decipherable only to those with the capacity to wade through legislative linguistics. It would set up a seven-member advisory board that would have the power to recommend cutting federal funding for colleges and universities that are viewed as harboring academic critics of Israel.

[...]

[Supporters] are claiming that they are fighting "anti-Americanism" as it is being taught on the college campuses.

[...]

The Republican House members who originally joined [Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Michigan)] in co-sponsoring this legislation should be named for the record. They are: John A. Boehner (Ohio), John R. Carter (Texas), Tom Cole (Oklahoma), James Greenwood (Penn.), Howard (Buck) McKeon (Calif.), Patrick J. Tiberi (Ohio) and Joe Wilson (South Carolina).

Americans will not be able to find out how their representatives voted on the bill. Hoekstra asked for a suspension of the House rules, which was approved, making it possible for the controversial measure to be passed with an unrecorded "voice vote." There is no record of how individual House members voted or if they even voted at all.

[...]

The only chance to destroy this legislation and stop it dead in its tracks is for enough grassroots citizens to rise up and demand that H.R. 3077 be put to rest.

[...]

It is the first time a senior figure in the interim government has acknowledged that the dire security situation in large parts of the country could affect the political process.

[...]

He said "support continues to grow" internationally for the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, even though the multinational force will see some reductions in the coming months.

[...]

The president also hailed the effort to train and equip Iraqi personnel to take over security for their country. He said nearly 115,000 Iraqi soldiers, police officers and other security personnel are now on duty and that 200,000 will be in place by the end of the year.

[...]

Some doubts have been raised about the reliability of Iraqi security forces. For instance, the General Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said recently that many Iraqis have been insufficiently trained and equipped. In some cases, the only "training" required of new policemen was that they wear a uniform, the report found. And only a fraction of the total number are actual troops.

[...]

The Iraqi government and coalition forces are taking "all necessary steps'' to meet the humanitarian needs of civilians in Fallujah, the Pentagon said on its Web site.

Fallujah General Hospital is fully staffed and has medical supplies, water and food, the military said.

The fighting took place in Baqouba and neighboring town of Buhriz, about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. American aircraft dropped two 500 pound bombs on an insurgent position.

[...]

In the insurgent-heavy city of Ramadi, 70 miles west of the capital, heavy fighting erupted on Monday between militants and U.S. forces, residents said.

Sunni clerics at several mosques called on residents to kick out bands of armed men who have come from outside the city, claiming that the clashes inside Ramada are having a negative impact on the economic situation of citizens.

North of Ramadi, a U.S. convoy came under attack near the town of Baghdadi, with one Humvee destroyed, according to a Baghdadi police Lt. Mohammed Abdel Karim.

[...]

A gunbattle erupted Sunday between militants and U.S. troops in the main market in the northern town of Beiji [a northern city that houses Iraq's biggest oil refinery source], killing at least six people and wounding 20 others, according to witnesses.

An outbreak of rebel attacks on police stations and government buildings has paralysed parts of the city.

Corpses have been splayed on city streets. Police have said they fear going back to their jobs.

Families are fleeing en masse, but insurgents have assured city bureaucrats that it is safe to return to work, that rebels will secure city streets.

Isolated pockets of fighting occurred mainly in the west and southwest of Mosul, 240 miles north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said.

[...]

“I expect the next few days will bring some hard fighting,” U.S. northern commander Brigadier General Carter Ham said in a statement. “The situation in Mosul is tense, but certainly not desperate.”

The findings of Dean Hamer, director of the US National Cancer Institute's Gene Structure and Regulation Unit, also claim that Jesus, the Buddha and Prophet Mohammed are likely to have carried the gene.

The research has, however, been strongly criticised by members of the church, reported the Scotsman newspaper published from Edinburgh.

[...]

In July, Scheuer anonymously wrote a best-selling book, "Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror," in which he faulted the way the U.S. was combating terrorism. The CIA soon ordered Scheuer to stop criticizing the agency during public appearances to promote the book.

But he continued working as a senior intelligence service official at the CIA's counter-terrorism center, a measure of the respect he receives at the agency.

One whistle-blower expert said that Scheuer's decision to publicly defy the CIA was unprecedented.

"I've never seen someone at that level come forward in the way that he has. It just doesn't happen," said Kris Kolesnik, executive director of the National Whistleblower Center.

[...]

Scheuer decided over the weekend to speak out, he said, because his concerns were being ignored by his superiors at the CIA and by the Sept. 11 commission.

"I'm proud to work [at the CIA], and they can say what they want about me, but I have no intention of leaving," Scheuer said. "They may force me to leave, they may fire me. But it's the best place to work that I know of. I'm proud to be an intelligence officer, and I want to stay one."

Scheuer said in an interview with The Washington Post on Monday that he believes the agency silenced him after CIA officials realized he was blaming the CIA, not the administration, for mishandling terrorism. "As long as the book was being used to bash the president, they gave me carte blanche to talk to the media," he said. "But this is a story about the failure of the bureaucracy to support policymakers."

[...]

The students told ABC News affiliate KMGH-TV in Denver they are performing Bob Dylan's song "Masters of War" during the Boulder High School Talent Exposé because they are Dylan fans. They said they want to express their views and show off their musical abilities.

But some students and adults who heard the band rehearse called a radio talk show Thursday morning, saying the song the band sang ended with a call for President Bush to die.

Threatening the president is a federal crime, so the Secret Service was called to the school to investigate.

Natonski, who designed the ground attack, said he and other planners took lessons from the failed three-week U.S. assault on the city in April, which was called off by the Bush administration after a worldwide outcry over civilians deaths.

[...]

"Had we done in April what we did now, the results would've been the same," Natonski said during a visit to the U.S. Marines' 1st Cavalry Division's 2nd Brigade, the unit charged with isolating Fallujah under a security cordon.

[...]

Natonski described the six days of ground war as a "flawless execution of the plan we drew up. We are actually ahead of schedule."

Several pre-assault tactics made the battle easier than expected, he said.

That move prevented insurgents from slipping out of the city during the assault, although many, including top leaders like Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Sheik Abdullah al-Janabi and Omar al-Hadid, are thought to have fled.

"We never expected them to be there. We're not after Zarqawi. We're after insurgents in general," Natonski said.

U.S. forces now occupy -but have yet to subdue -the entire city. U.S. officers said that it still could take several days of fighting to clear the final pockets of resistance.

Associated Press Television News footage showed some armed men, heads covered with black hoods and brandishing Kalashnikov rifles, among the marchers. The demonstrators, estimated by police to number between 60 and 70, carried banners calling Allawi a "thug" and "traitor."

A BBC correspondent in the city centre says US marines are still under sniper attack at their main base.

Insurgent attacks against American troops here have markedly intensified in the past two weeks, and enemy combatants are now conducting a more determined battle, commanders say.

"My personal take is that Ramadi is a less-publicized Falluja, in the sense of the combat you face every time you go into town," said Capt. Ben Siebold, a company commander in an Army battalion stationed in the downtown at a small and aptly named base, Combat Outpost. "In the time I've been here, the nature of the enemy has changed," he said. "He's more determined, more organized and a little bit better shot."

According to commanders in Ramadi, the heightened violence here is an outgrowth of the siege of Falluja and the holy fasting month of Ramadan. They say some insurgent fighters from Falluja have migrated to Ramadi, a city of 400,000 on the Euphrates that is the capital of the sprawling Anbar Province, which covers most of western Iraq.

[...]

"Ramadi is really out of control, and they needed another infantry battalion in the city," said Lt. Col. Justin Gubler, commander of the First Battalion, 503rd Infantry, at Combat Outpost. Up to 150 foreign fighters are in the city, he said. "We've seen an increase in their proficiency and their will to fight."

Guerrillas at Mosul detonated a car bomb as an Iraqi national guard unit from Kirkuk went by, injuring seven of them.

Guerrillas at largely Turkmen Tel Afar also clashed with US troops.

The US arrested 4 Sunni clerics from the Association of Muslim Scholars.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that a Communist representative in the 100-member National Council in Iraq, which serves as a sort of interim parliament, was assassinated while traveling in the north near Kirkuk on Saturday. This would be like a senator being assassinated in the United States.

Armed men roamed the streets and manned checkpoints between city quarters. Mosque preachers called on Mosul residents to flood into the streets to protect their quarters and government offices and shops. The main streets seemed deserted. American troops had withdrawn from the center of the city, but maintained control of bridges.

All signs of Iraqi national guardsmen and police had disappeared. The police chief of Ninevah province resigned (other reports say he was fired by the Allawi government).

US military spokesmen denied that guerrillas were in control of the city, and maintained that US troops and Iraqi national guardsmen continued to advance into it. US warplanes repeatedly bombed suspected safe houses of the guerrillas. Guerrillas had killed one American serviceman in Mosul on Thursday.

A troubling bit of ethnic politics emerged when it became apparent that the remaining Iraqi troops fighting alongside the Americans against guerrillas in Mosul were mostly Kurds. Mosul, a city of about 1 million, is largely Sunni Arab but is up north near the Kurdish areas. Arab-Kurdish relations hit a new nadir at the news, and AP reported that "Gunmen attacked the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party in an hourlong battle that a party official said left six assailants dead." This attack on the PUK HQ was probably in revenge for the Kurdish national guardsmen cooperating with US troops.

[...]

Al-Khalissi said he and his faction fully support the religious decree issued by Iraq's influential Sunni Muslim authority, the Association of Muslim Scholars, in which it prohibited Iraqis from participating in the US attack on Falluja.

"I am here today as a Shia figure belonging to a prominent Shia religious family to confirm that Iraqi Sunni Muslims are our brothers and dear countrymen. We lived since the dawn of Islam in this country as brothers.

"We back our brotherly Sunni Muslims in the city of Falluja and nothing on earth will spoil our brotherhood with them."

"Now that the bridge (into Falluja) is open I will bring out casualties and all aid work can be done here (at Falluja's hospital)," he added.

He said he had not heard of any Iraqi civilians being trapped inside the city and did not think that was the case.

But aid workers say there are still hundreds of families left in the city, which has been pummelled by sustained aerial bombardment and artillery fire in recent days.

"We know of at least 157 families inside Falluja who need our help," said Firdus al-Ubadi of the Iraqi Red Crescent.

[...]

The Iraqi Red Crescent sent seven trucks and ambulances to Falluja on Saturday, hoping to get food, blankets, water purification tablets and medicine to hundreds of families trapped inside the city during the past six days of fighting.

"There is no need to bring [Red Crescent] supplies in because we have supplies of our own for the people," said US marine Colonel Mike Shupp.

"None of the injured residents are being allowed to come to the hospital, while those outside are not allowed to go into the town," Abu Fahd said.

"The town is suffering from cuts in power and water supplies. There are no medicines or ambulances either.

"The injured and the dead are now on the streets. Many families want to get out of their houses, but they have no alternative shelters to go into," he said.

"The US forces have prevented us from entering the town claiming it is not safe. US forces have said they control 80% of the town."

"I have asked them to allow the relief team into the areas they control, to offer humanitarian aid for women, children and the elderly, and transfer the injured to the hospital, but they have refused," Abu Fahd said.

"They are in the city," Firdoos al-Abadi said on Saturday.

She said 30 volunteers with five trucks and three ambulances had driven into the city, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad, after an initial delay at a U.S. checkpoint.

While the US$ still dominates world trade (about 52% of all trade is transacted in dollars), the Euro has come from nowhere to take about 22% of all trade transactions.

The Euro certainly does have the coverage now and volume to handle the world's oil trade, unlike the ¥en or Yuan.

Even better for oil exporters, a switch to the Euro -- an intrinsically stronger money than the US$ -- will, by the magic irony of world markets, lead to a higher oil price in dollar terms!

[...]

Also, remaining users of the US$ for oil transactions ... perhaps those Saudi princely friends of the Bush family .. will find that the dollar buys ever less, and so they have to increase their prices to maintain purchasing power. This ratchets up the oil price in dollars, before being rounded up again when it is priced and traded in Euro.

[...]

In Uden, 6,000 people, mostly Dutch, along with the Mayor Joke Kersten protested against the violence against Muslims with a silent march.

[...]

Here's why I'm worried.

Taking a closer look, it becomes almost obvious that the recipients of these millions of “democratic dollars” are probably the same gang of anti-Chavez Venezuelans who have been trying to “get rid” of Chavez in the last three years.

[...]

Due to a massive campaign in defense of Sumate that has been launched by the US State Department, the case has experienced interesting delays. Gershman’s visit came one week after the arraignment hearing had been postponed from November 2 to November 24, as a result of the resignation of one of the defendant’s attorneys.

Subsequently, the case experienced another development after US Ambassador to Venezuela, William Brownfield, visited Chief Justice Ivan Rincon and requested he intervene to prevent the case from proceeding.

[...]

Gershman’s visit ... the first visit by the NED president to a foreign nation to defend the organization’s interests ... was an apparent “last chance” offer to the Venezuelan government to stop the case or face the wrath of the US government.

Even presidential candidate John Kerry got on the Sumate defense bandwagon in the days prior to the US elections, criticizing Chavez for “political persecution” and accusing him of heading towards a dictatorship.

Other Sumate defenders include US Congress members Christopher Cox and Gregory Meeks ... both on the NED Board of Directors ... and Senator John McCain and former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright who chair the NED core grantee organizations, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, respectively.

Izzat has used his influence as the only devout Muslim in the former Ba'athist regime and encouraged different Islamic groups from the north to the south to make contact with local Ba'ath councils and units of Iraqi forces.

"After the downfall of former regime, one of the relatives of al-Douri came to me and asked me to negotiate with coalition forces so that he could surrender on three conditions," Talabani told reporters.

Al-Douri had offered to surrender provided he was not handed to Kuwait, was given special medical care and had his name scrapped from the US most wanted list of former Iraqi officials, Talabani said.

The US-led coalition had agreed on the first two conditions but denied the third one because he was the number two in the former regime and his crimes could not be spared, Talabani stressed.

Al-Douri was reportedly in bad health when the US-led war began last March, probably suffering from blood cancer, but his current condition is unknown....

LOAD-DATE: November 6, 2003

...

December 16, 2003 - Xinhuanet, China View

BAGHDAD, Dec. 16 (Xinhuanet) -- Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Saddam Hussein's top lieutenant, has surrendered to the US forces in Iraq, Dubai-based al-Arabiya TV channel reported Tuesday.

And if somebody told you it wasn't -- that it was just an error or pure random chance, never mind, keep emptying your wallet -- you'd start to wonder about their motives.

Common sense. Not a conspiracy theory. Just what you're seeing, right in front of you.

Without getting into all the state-by-state details -- I'll let Prof. Freeman tend to the numbers -- what happened last Tuesday, where a wide variety of extremely accurate exit polls suddenly turned out to be at the extremes or even beyond their margin of error, was exceedingly unlikely -- even if the benefits of these errors had been evenly distributed.

But they weren't evenly distributed. They favored Bush. Over and over and over. That's the coin flipping. And flipping. And still coming up heads. Heads in Florida. Heads in Ohio. Heads in a bunch of other swing states (even while the exit polls remained relatively accurate elsewhere). Almost everywhere the election was close, the coin just kept coming up heads.

How bad was it?

According to Dr. Freeman's analysis... 1 in 250,000,000.

One in a quarter of a billion.

In simpler terms, that 50-50 coin flip just came up "heads" almost thirty times in a row.

Do you still trust that coin now?

We are publishing his and other eyewitness accounts from the city in order to provide the fullest possible range of perspectives from those who are there:

[November 11:]

A row of palm trees used to run along the street outside my house - now only the trunks are left.

The upper half of each tree has vanished, blown away by mortar fire.

From my window, I can also make out that the minarets of several mosques have been toppled.

There are more and more dead bodies on the streets and the stench is unbearable.

Smoke is everywhere.

[...]

I tried to flee the city last night but I could not get very far. It was too dangerous.

[...]

Without water and electricity, we feel completely cut off from everyone else.

[...]

It is hard to know how much people outside Falluja are aware of what is going on here.

I want them to know about conditions inside this city - there are dead women and children lying on the streets.

People are getting weaker from hunger. Many are dying from their injuries because there is no medical help left in the city whatsoever.

Some families have started burying their dead in their gardens.

I think it is misleading to say the US controls 70% of the city because the fighters are constantly on the move.

They go from street to street, attacking the army in some places, letting them through elsewhere so that they can attack them later.

The fighters have told me they are prepared to resist the Americans until the death.

They say they are fighting not just for Falluja, but for all Iraq.

In the Hasbiyyah area, I counted the bodies of at least six US soldiers lying on the ground.

Some of them were badly mangled with various bits blown off. Others were in better condition, as if they had taken small-arms fire.

I noticed two of the US soldiers were still clutching their guns tightly across their chests. But most of their weapons were missing.

Some of the dead are beginning to rot in the streets.

But the living do not exactly smell great either - I have not had a bath for a week.

Hospitals have all but run out of supplies and most people know this.

Hospital workers clean the floor after receiving fresh casualties

But still the injured are being taken there - just so that they can be near the doctors and receive some comfort.

The Iraqi health ministry has not sent any extra supplies.

Food supplies are also running out. All shops are shut.

Some people who fled the city a few days ago have begun returning because they ran out of food.

Massey entered Iraq as part of the initial US invasion in March 2003. He witnessed—and in some cases participated in—the killing of innocent civilians. During a single 48-hour period, he says, he saw as many as 30 civilians killed by US gunfire at highway checkpoints.

[...]

Massey said that the hostility of the Iraqi people to the presence of the US military grew exponentially over the time he was there in direct response to the brutal methods employed by American troops against the entire Iraqi population.

[...]

“When you put your hand up in the air with a closed fist, in the Marines it means you want them to stop,” he said. “But, as we later learned, it’s actually the international sign of solidarity. It has a totally different meaning for the Iraqis—to them it was a sign like hello. And that was just one example of how we were not trained properly to understand the cultural differences between us and them.

“The bottom line is they [the military command] don’t see the need to teach culture and humanity to men whose singular purpose is to kill. And that was just one of the cultural miscues."

Dutch news agency ANP cited Defense Minister Henk Kamp on Friday as saying that the country's 1,350-contingent will leave the US-led multinational contingent.

John E. McLaughlin, a 32-year CIA veteran who was acting director for two months this summer until Goss took over, resigned after warning Goss that his top aide, former Capitol Hill staff member Patrick Murray, was treating senior officials disrespectfully and risked widespread resignations, the officials said.

Yesterday, the agency official who oversees foreign operations, Deputy Director of Operations Stephen R. Kappes, tendered his resignation after a confrontation with Murray. Goss and the White House pleaded with Kappes to reconsider and he agreed to delay his decision until Monday, the officials said.

Several other senior clandestine service officers are threatening to leave, current and former agency officials said.

[...]

"It's the worst roiling I've ever heard of," said one former senior official with knowledge of the events. "There's confusion throughout the ranks and an extraordinary loss of morale and incentive."

[...]

With the political costs of retreat almost incalculable, the Bush administration in turn might ratchet up the violence (as it did in Vietnam) before considering real withdrawal strategies, hoping that the prospect of tens of thousands of further deaths in the next year would lead Iraqis to accept some continued American military presence in the country and, most important, a continued hand in the management of the country's petroleum resources.

"The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war," Ashcroft said in his first speech since his resignation became public Tuesday.

That decision followed other judicial setbacks, including a divided Supreme Court ruling in June that the president does not have the authority to hold terror suspects indefinitely without access to attorneys or courts to challenge their detention.

In his speech, Ashcroft said unelected judges should show deference to the president, particularly on matters of national defense and security...

The region's governor blamed the uprising on ''the betrayal of some police members'' and said National Guard units had arrived to help quell the violence. Also, a U.S. infantry battalion was diverted from Fallujah and sent back to Mosul because of insurgent attacks in that northern city.

[...]

Overnight, two city mosques were hit by airstrikes after troops reported sniper fire from inside. On Saturday, two Marines were killed by a homemade bomb southeast of Fallujah.

[...]

Overnight, two city mosques were hit by airstrikes after troops reported sniper fire from inside. On Saturday, two Marines were killed by a homemade bomb southeast of Fallujah.

[...]

A U.S. warplane dropped a 500-pound bomb to destroy an insurgent tunnel network in the city Saturday, according to CNN embedded correspondent Jane Arraf.

U.S. officials said they hoped the attack would be the final assault on Fallujah, followed by a house-to-house clearing operation to search for boobytraps, weapons and guerrillas hiding in the rubble.

[...]

A four-vehicle convoy of the Iraqi Red Crescent carrying humanitarian assistance arrived at the heart of Fallujah on Saturday after the Iraqi and American troops allowed them to pass.

''I call upon the scores or hundreds of the brothers from the mujahedeen ... to press the American forces outside'' Fallujah, al-Baghdadi said in a telephone interview late Friday with Al-Jazeera television.

''We chose the path of armed jihad and say clearly that ridding Iraq of the occupation will not be done by ballots. Ayad Allawi's government ... represents the fundamentalist right-wing of the White House and not the Iraqi people,'' he said a reference to Iraq's prime minister, who gave to the go-ahead for the Fallujah invasion.

[...]

Meanwhile, the U.S. military said four American helicopters had been hit by insurgent ground fire in two separate attacks near Fallujah. Their uninjured crews were able to return to base safely.

Earlier this week, three helicopters were downed by ground fire during the Fallujah operation.

[...]

U.S. and Iraqi forces launched their mass ground assault against Fallujah late Monday after the city's hardline clerical leadership refused to hand over extremists, including Jordanian terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has a $25 million bounty on his head from the Americans.

The clerics insisted al-Zarqawi was not there.

[...]

Dawoud said Saturday that al-Zarqawi and Fallujah leader Abdullah al-Janabi ''have escaped.''

[...]

Fallujah was covered in smoke midday Saturday as U.S. artillery, tanks and soldiers launched what military hoped would be the final attack.

[...]

Iraqi insurgents have been shooting at U.S. helicopters, hitting two on Saturday. But none of the crew were hurt, and U.S. casualties total 24 dead since the attack began. Five Iraqi government soldiers have also been killed.

More than 400 U.S. wounded have been airlifted to Germany.

Civilian casualties are not known.

[...]

Eyewitnesses in Mosul told Aljazeera.net that major sections of the city had been seized by anti-US fighters who were seen patrolling the streets.

"They control the streets, no one is going out for fear of more US air strikes," Abd Allah Ghafar, a freelance journalist in the city told Aljazeera.net in a telephone interview.

"The situation is very bad, there is no security, only armed resistance groups on the streets and it seems there is no government in Mosul," he said.

Another Mosul-based journalist told Aljazeera that US armoured vehicles were forced to retreat from two main bridges they had blocked off after coming under a fierce mortar barrage and rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) fire.

[...]

US military spokesman Captain Angela Bowman explained that retreat was carried out at the request of the governorate to allow civilians to attend weekly prayers at the mosques.

[...]

"In the southwestern area there are terrorists and insurgents on the streets but this is not city wide. We are still well in control," she said.

[...]

The US assault on Fallujah is a prime example of what Todd calls "theatrical micromilitarism." I mean, calling it "Operation Phantom Fury"--it's a sick joke. What's "phantom" about it? For months the US has been touting this incursion and publicly built up forces outside the city for weeks, giving the enemy plenty of time to rig explosives and/or skip town. Billing it as a "decisive battle"--another fraud. Guerrilla warfare operates on an entirely different set of rules; as has been oft pointed out, America won every major battle during Vietnam and still lost. What's unfolding is not a decisive moment but a ghastly production that trains hellfire on a symbolic target and "plays well" to American citizens as a flex of muscle, as witness the NY Post cover today of an American soldier with a cigarette dangling from his mouth with the headline "Marlboro Men Kick Butt."

[...]

The assault, dubbed Operation Phantom Fury, perversely started on Laylat e-Qadr, the most important and holy night of the year for the Islamic world.

In terms of the information war, the hospital was indeed the most strategic of targets. During the first siege of Fallujah in April, doctors told independent media the real story about the suffering of civilian victims. So this time the Pentagon took no chances: no gory, disturbing photos of the elderly, women and children - the thousands unable to leave Fallujah in advance of this week's offensive, the civilian victims of the relentless bombing.

But this did not prevent the world from seeing doctors and patients at the hospital handcuffed to the floor - as if they were terrorists. Hospital director Dr Salih al-Issawi told Agence France-Presse that the Americans blocked him and other doctors from going to the center of Fallujah to help another clinic in distress; he also said an ambulance that tried to leave the hospital was shot at by the Americans - just like in April, when all ambulances were targeted. The Geneva Convention is explicit: in a war situation, hospitals and ambulances are neutral.

[...]

The main story playing in the Arab world in the past 24 hours is that of Mohammed Abboud - who saw his nine-year-old son bleed to death of shrapnel wounds when his house in Fallujah was hit because he could not venture out to go to a hospital. Abboud had to bury his son in his own garden.

[...]

There is no power, no water, shops are closed, food is scarce and practically no medical supplies remain, according to Dr Sami al-Jumaili, speaking to al-Jazeera. No more clinics are open throughout the city - and there is no possible way to estimate how many civilians are dead, blown up, burned or injured, although al-Jumaili tells of "scores of injured civilians". A brand-new clinic funded by a Saudi Islamic relief non-governmental agency was bombed by the Americans during the weekend, as well as a medical dispensary in the city center: this was apparently the last place where anybody could get any medical attention.

[...]

“The US troops have sprayed chemical and nerve gases on resistance fighters, turning them hysteric in a heartbreaking scene,” an Iraqi doctor, who requested anonymity, told Al-Quds Press.

“Some Fallujah residents have been further burnt beyond treatment by poisonous gases,” added resistance fighters, who took part in Golan battles, northwest of Fallujah.

In August last year, the United States admitted dropping the internationally-banned incendiary weapon of napalm on Iraq, despite earlier denials by the Pentagon that the “horrible” weapon had not been used in the three-week invasion of Iraq.

After the offensive on Iraq ended on April 9 last year, Iraqis began to complain about unexploded cluster bombs that still litter their cities.

As U.S.-led troops pressed their offensive Thursday in Fallujah, insurgents stepped up their counterattacks elsewhere in Iraq, exploding a car bomb that killed 17 people and wounded 20 in Baghdad and storming six police stations in an audacious attack in the northern city of Mosul.

[...]

In response to the wave of rebel attacks across Iraq, the U.S. military has been forced to detach an armored battalion from the outskirts of Fallujah to Mosul, The New York Times reported. The troop movement has stripped about a third of the forces that had cordoned off Fallujah in an effort to catch insurgents attempting to flee, the Times said.

The violence in Mosul appeared to be part of a coordinated attack. Dozens of gunmen stormed six Iraqi police stations, looting them of weapons and ammunition and setting some of the buildings ablaze.

Battles in Mosul raged for hours between the insurgents and U.S.-led forces, and officials suggested that the city would be dangerous for some time. A Kurdish official suggested that some Iraqi police had been cooperating with the insurgents.

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In Baghdad, the midday car bomb on bustling Sadoun Street killed 17 people, wounded 20, destroyed two buildings and at least 12 cars.

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Also Thursday, a car bomb exploded near the headquarters of a leading Kurdish political party in the northern city of Kirkuk, killing one bystander and injuring four others.

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According to The Washington Post, residents in southern Fallujah reported that the bodies of 20 foreign fighters were found outside a truck repair shop, and many had been killed by a gunshot to the head. Insurgents native to Fallujah said the foreigners were executed for deserting their positions when the U.S.-led assault began Monday.

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Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that many insurgents may have slipped away and blended into Iraqi society, only to wreak havoc elsewhere in the country.

"That's the nature of an insurgency," Myers said.

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"It's not working at all for the insurgents. We're exactly on plan. The insurgents are paying a heavy price for their resistance."

As battles go, Fallujah has been a big disappointment to the U.S. military, which had wanted to draw the Iraqi insurgents into a cataclysmic mistake: a “fair” fight. Not that any officer relished the prospect of a Stalingrad- or Hue-like street-to-street, house-to-house blood-letting. But the alternative has even less to recommend it: a continuing series of roadside bombings and mortar and grenade ambushes that bleed American forces and frustrate efforts to secure Iraq ahead of January’s elections.

Unfortunately, from a military standpoint, the latter, less attractive option is the reality, and the choice was never the U.S. military’s to make. Iraq’s insurgents, with weeks to react as U.S. forces gathered and postured about what was about to happen in Fallujah, decided against turning it into al-Alamo. They saw the folly of taking on the Americans on their own terms, and they did what intelligent, determined guerrilla movements have always done in the face of overwhelming force: They faded away and lived to fight and kill and maim another day.

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“In military terms, Fallujah is not going to be much of a plus at all,” says Bernard Trainor, a retired three-star Marine Corps general. “The downside is that we’ve knocked the hell out of this city, and the only insurgents we really got were the nut-cases and zealots the smart ones left behind — the guys who really want to die for Allah.”

An Iraqi journalist in the city reported seeing burned U.S. vehicles and bodies in the street, with more buried under the wreckage. He said two men trying to move a corpse were shot down by a sniper.

Two of the three small clinics in the city have been bombed, and in one case, medical staff and patients were killed, he said. A U.S. tank was positioned beside the third clinic, and residents were afraid to go there, he said.

"People are afraid of even looking out the window because of snipers," he said, asking that he not be named for his own safety. "The Americans are shooting anything that moves."

A battle erupted near a mosque in northwest Falluja on Friday just hours after U.S. Marines said insurgents were now trapped in the south of the city.

Insurgents determined to show they are undeterred by the four-day-old offensive in Iraq's most rebellious city have hit back hard with attacks and bombings elsewhere, causing two days of bloody chaos in the northern city of Mosul.

Iraqi authorities struggling to contain the unrest roiling Sunni Muslim cities have imposed curfews on Baghdad, Mosul, Baiji, Ramadi and Falluja this week. A curfew has been in force in Samarra since U.S.-led forces stormed it last month.

U.S. Captain Angela Bowman described Mosul as calm overnight, with its three million residents under a dusk-to-dawn curfew, after Thursday's attacks on nine police stations.

An American soldier was killed in the Mosul fight