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Blood Fruit: The Blowback Harvest Begins

Fighting them "over there" to keep from fighting them "over here"? Hell no. We’re fighting them "over here" because we’re fighting them "over there." UK intelligence confirms that last year’s July 7 London bombings were a direct result of the Iraq War. It was not the work of long-time al Qaeda activists, but young Britons who had been radicalized by the unprovoked invasion of

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Dead Cities: The Fallujah Option in Iraq?

Of all the war crimes that have flowed from the originating war crime of George W. Bush’s unprovoked invasion of Iraq, perhaps the most flagrant was the wanton destruction of Fallujah in November 2004. Now, as ignominious defeat looms for Bush’s Babylonian folly, some of the key players in fomenting the war are urging that the "Fallujah Option" be applied to an even bigger target: Baghdad.

What these influential warmongers openly call for is the "pacification" of Baghdad: a brutal firestorm by U.S. forces, ravaging both Sunni insurgents and Shiite

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Shootout at the Plantation: Colonial Masters Turn on the Hired Help

So now we are down to the raw meat at last. One by one, the justifications mouthed by the makers of the Iraq War have been stripped away, revealed as gossamer tissues of lies and obfuscation: weapons of mass destruction, Iraqi involvement in 9/11, reducing terrorism in the world and of course, bringing democracy to the poor Iraqi people. This last rag has been the one clutched most fiercely of late by the warlords in Washington and London, but now it too has been cast aside into the blood and muck. All that’s left is the naked,

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Picture Imperfect: False Image, Real War

Juan Cole can dispense more penetrating wisdom in a casual blog post than the entire corps of corporate media commentators can muster in year of their blatherings. He does it again here, in a short piece tacked on after another of his indispensible readings of Iraq’s Arabic-language press. First, he takes neo-con Kenneth Timmerman to task for peddling the latest scaremongering lie about Iran – that it has bought a nuclear warhead from North Korea.

Cole then draws on Foucault for an insight that captures perfectly the

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An Unpardonable Offense

The Iraqi Kurds have clearly embraced George W. Bush’s philosophy of liberty: i.e., it exists only as a gift from all-powerful state leaders, who can bestow it – and revoke it – at will. The Kurds have "pardoned" journalist Kamal Sayid Qadir, who had been sentenced to prison for the heinous crime of writing a website article criticizing Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani for corruption.

Barzani, now a pet of the Bush Faction, is perhaps best remembered – by those with any historical memory – <a href="http://mywebpage.netscape.com/kurdistanobserve/Newso13.htm"

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Annals of Liberation

Bound, Blindfolded and Dead: The Face of Atrocity in Baghdad (NYT):
Mohannad al-Azawi had just finished sprinkling food in his bird cages at his pet shop in south Baghdad, when three carloads of gunmen pulled up. In front of a crowd, he was grabbed by his shirt and driven off…Mr. Azawi’s body was found the next morning at a sewage treatment plant. A slight man who raised nightingales, he had been hogtied, drilled with power tools and shot.

In the last

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Road Warrior: Dick Cheney Sits in Darkness

The Smoking Gun finds the smoking gun behind the Bush Administration’s unbending ignorance, arrogance, incompetence and stupidity. From the "Vice Presidential Downtime Requirements" sent by Dick Cheney’s staff to all hotels where Deadeye will be cooling his heels between public bouts of warmongering mendacity, the seventh item on the list tells us everything we need to know:

"All televisions tuned

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Sucker Punch

Not only thugs, but suckers too. NY Daily News reports on transcripts of tirades by Saddam Hussein, wondering what he has to do to get the West to believe that he has destroyed his WMD as ordered:

"We don’t have anything hidden!" the frustrated Iraqi president interjected at one meeting, transcripts show. At another meeting, in 1996, Saddam wondered whether UN inspectors would "roam Iraq for 50 years" in a pointless hunt for weapons of mass
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Message From the Planet

Inuit See Signs In Arctic Thaw. From the Washington Post:

PANGNIRTUNG, Canada — Thirty miles from the Arctic Circle, hunter Noah Metuq feels the Arctic changing. Its frozen grip is loosening; the people and animals who depend on its icy reign are experiencing a historic reshaping of their world. Fish and wildlife are following the retreating ice caps northward. Polar bears are losing the floes they need for hunting. Seals, unable to find stable ice, are hauling up on islands
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