A picture taken at the scene of the Haditha killings shows several dead Iraqis who were killed by Marines.

Have they always taught soldiers to piss on dead people, or was it a special directive Cheney and Rumsfeld came up with?  Via Al Jazeera English:

A US soldier has told a military jury in California how his commander killed five Iraqi civilians in the western al-Anbar province in 2005 and then asked him to lie about it.

At a trial stemming from one of the Iraq war’s most controversial episodes, Sergeant Sanick Dela Cruz testified on Wednesday, the third day of Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich’s court martial.

Wuterich was Dela Cruz’s squad leader, who Dela Cruz said gunned down the Iraqis after they pulled up in a car near the scene of a bombing in which a US marine had died.

In all, 24 Iraqi civilians including women and children were killed in the revenge attacks – 19 in several houses along with the five men who pulled up in a car in the town of Haditha on November 19, 2005.

Victims unarmed

At the military trial in Camp Pendleton, California, Dela Cruz told prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel Sean Sullivan that he saw the men outside the car on the side of the road.

He testified that the Iraqis did not appear to have any weapons and were not making any quick moves toward the car. He said he then saw a man drop to the ground.”That’s when I saw Staff Sergeant Wuterich kneeling with his gun aimed at the Iraqi. He was by the road holding the weapon in a firing position,” said Dela Cruz, demonstrating that position in the courtroom.

He said he could not recall how many gunshots he had heard. Dela Cruz also said that when he looked back in the direction of the car he did not see any of the men anymore.

“I run through there and crouched on the side of the vehicle. I saw four to five Iraqis dead near the trunk area of the car,” he said.

“I saw Sergeant Wuterich approach the bodies, he shot at them,” said Dela Cruz, adding that Wuterich went around to each corpse and shot it in the upper body from close range.

Revenge killings

“Sergeant Wuterich approached me and told me if anyone asks, the Iraqis were running away from the car and the Iraqi army shot them,” Dela Cruz said.

Dela Cruz, a veteran of three combat deployments, said he later urinated on the mangled head of one of the bodies, adding that he was “regretful” of his actions.

“I was pissed, sir, about what happened (the bombing),” he said…

Read more here.

In 2003 we went into Iraq under scandalously false pretexts, guns blazing—bragging about our ability to deliver “shock and awe” with impunity (the mark of the bully) and with one goal in mind: to rob and rape that country blind of its riches. The official excuse was that Iraq and Saddam were mortal threats that had to be neutralized.

Within a matter of weeks if not days, the official line—adopted without missing a beat by the entire punditocracy—was that we had gone in “to save Iraq”, “make it a democracy,” and all the rest of the self-serving claptrap we use over and over again to justify our uber-criminal behavior.  With a straight face the official voices declared that those who had the audacity to resist our criminal violence were ingrates. Don’t believe it? You may be forgiven: it is rather unbelievable.

Not too long after that, another somersault in logic and truth took place. This time the contortion was of Olympian quality, as we saw the same filthy pundits—a great many of them liberals—talking with a straight face (as did the man in the White House and other administration flacks) that if the Iraqis continued to “misbehave”, continued attacking our troops, imagine that, “we’d leave”—yeah, that’s right, their punishment would be that we, the self-annointed saviors, would leave!

Buwahahahahahahah….! Isn’t that a threat to shit in your pants? They didn’t receive us as liberators!

Reality quiz:

What would you do if you were the victim of a brutal home invasion; if they raped your wife and daughter, killed your animals, beat the shit out of you, and robbed you blind, to boot—oh, and reduced your house to rubble—and then they declared with a straight face that if you were not grateful for all that, if you didn’t beg them to stay … they’d leave? How’s that for the mother of all Orwellian nonsense?

Only with a totally confused public can the revolting media creatures who pass for journalists and commentators in the US foist such a huge con on the public mind … with nary an audible  protest.

Yeah, it’s pathetic alright. And if we don’t watch it, it will happen again.

PATRICE GREANVILLE is editor of the Greanville Post, a site dedicated to political, cultural and historical analyses.

Population of Iraq: 30 million

Percentage of Iraqis who lived in slum conditions in 2000: 17

Percentage of Iraqis who live in slum conditions in 2011: 50

Number of the 30 million Iraqis living below the poverty line: 7 million.

Number of Iraqis who died of violence 2003-2011: 150,000 to 400,000.

Orphans in Iraq: 4.5 million.

Orphans living in the streets: 600,000.

Number of women, mainly widows, who are primary breadwinners in family: 2 million.

Iraqi refugees displaced by the American war to Syria: 1 million

Internally displaced persons in Iraq: 1.3 million

Proportion of displaced persons who have returned home since 2008: 1/8

Rank of Iraq on Corruption Index among 182 countries: 175

The nine-year-old Iraq war came to an official end on Thursday, but paying for it will continue for decades until U.S. taxpayers have shelled out an estimated $4 trillion.

Over a 50-year period, that comes to $80 billion annually.

Although that only represents about 1% of nation’s gross domestic product, it’s more than half of the national budget deficit. It’s also roughly equal to what the U.S. spends on the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and the Environmental Protection Agency combined each year.

Near the start of the war, the U.S. Defense Department estimated it would cost $50 billion to $80 billion. White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey was dismissed in 2002 after suggesting the price of invading and occupying Iraq could reach $200 billion.

“The direct costs for the war were about $800 billion, but the indirect costs, the costs you can’t easily see, that payoff will outlast you and me,” said Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at American Progress, a Washington, D.C. think tank, and a former assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan…

[continues at Marketwatch]

As the war in Afghanistan passes its ten-year mark, sexual assault runs rampant within the ranks, with an estimated one in three female service members raped during their service, according to at least one peer-reviewed study. This is in a military where women comprise more 11 per cent of active duty service members deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and more than 15 per cent of the total military, with at least 200,000 active duty women currently serving. This epidemic also affects men: 60 per cent of women serving in the National Guard and Reserve, along with 27 per cent of men, are estimated to have experienced Military Sexual Trauma (MST). Perpetrators rely on a chain of command that appears to offer virtual impunity for sexual assaults committed against lower-ranking service members.

Military reports and Congress-appointed task forces acknowledge that sexual assault within the military is widespread. While the Department of Defense (DoD) has repeatedly said it is attempting to curb the problem, the most recent evidence shows that it has failed to adequately address the spread of this outbreak …

Read more here.

President Barack Obama announced on Friday that all U.S. troops will leave Iraq by the end of the year. The president made the announcement at a White House briefing following a private video conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

“As promised the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, the war in Iraq will be over,” Obama said.

More than 4,400 American military members have been killed, and another 2,000 wounded since the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003.

The two countries have been negotiating over whether the United States would leave behind up to several thousand military trainers after year-end, or if all remaining troops would depart as planned by Dec. 31. The main sticking point has been legal immunity for any U.S. forces that remain.

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago ruled Monday two men can move forward with a civil lawsuit against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The Tribune reports the Court upheld a decision from a federal judge allowing a lawsuit which holds Rumsfeld personally responsible for the torture of Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, two former defense contractors in Iraq.

In 2006, while Vance and Ertel were working in Iraq for Shield Group Security, a private contractor, they began to suspect their employer of involvement in illegal arms trading, bribery, and other activities. The two reported their concerns to the U.S. Government and soon became FBI informants. According to Courthouse News Service, Shield soon confiscated Vance and Ertel’s credentials, which effectively trapped them in the Red Zone. According to court documents, the two men called their government contacts, who told them “they should interpret Shield Group Security’s actions as taking them hostage, and should barricade themselves with weapons in a room of the compound. They were assured that U.S. Forces would come to rescue them.”

After U.S. Forces picked up the two and they shared their information with military, Vance and Ertel were arrested, handcuffed, blindfolded and taken to Camp Prosperity near Baghdad. After two days at Camp Prosperity, they were shipped to Camp Cropper where they were “detained incommunicado,” kept in solitary confinement and tortured. According to the court report, the men were kept in cold cells covered in feces, often deprived of food and water, walled, denied medical care and subject to various forms of psychological torture.

Read the full post at Chicagoist

Some of the project’s findings:

• While we know how many US soldiers have died in the wars (just over 6000), what is startling is what we don’t know about the levels of injury and illness in those who have returned from the wars.  New disability claims continue to pour into the VA, with 550,000 just through last fall.  Many deaths and injuries among US contractors have not been identified.
• At least 137,000 civilians have died and more will die in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan as a result of the fighting at the hands of all parties to the conflict.
• The armed conflict in Pakistan, which the U.S. helps the Pakistani military fight by funding, equipping and training them, has taken as many lives as the conflict in neighboring Afghanistan.
• Putting together the conservative numbers of war dead, in uniform and out, brings the total to 225,000.
• Millions of people have been displaced indefinitely and are living in grossly inadequate conditions.  The current number of war refugees and displaced persons — 7,800,000 — is equivalent to all of the people of Connecticut and Kentucky fleeing their homes.
• The wars have been accompanied by erosions in civil liberties at home and human rights violations abroad.
• The human and economic costs of these wars will continue for decades, some costs not peaking until mid-century. Many of the wars’ costs are invisible to Americans, buried in a variety of budgets, and so have not been counted or assessed.  For example, while most people think the Pentagon war appropriations are equivalent to the wars’ budgetary costs, the true numbers are twice that, and the full economic cost of the wars much larger yet. Conservatively estimated, the war bills already paid and obligated to be paid are $3.2 trillion in constant dollars. A more reasonable estimate puts the number at nearly $4 trillion.

View the entire project at The Cost of War

In the year after the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration flooded the conquered country with cash to pay for reconstruction — wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.

This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash. For the first time, federal auditors are suggesting that some or all of the cash may have been stolen, not just mislaid in an accounting error. Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, said the missing $6.6 billion may be “the largest theft of funds in national history.”

Theft of such a staggering sum might seem unlikely, but U.S. officials aren’t ruling it out. Some U.S. contractors were accused of siphoning off tens of millions in kickbacks and graft during the post-invasion period, especially in its chaotic early days. But Iraqi officials were viewed as prime offenders.

Pentagon officials have contended for the last six years that they could account for the money if given enough time to track down the records. But repeated attempts to find the documentation, or better yet the cash, were fruitless.

Iraqi officials argue that the U.S. government was supposed to safeguard the stash under a 2004 legal agreement it signed with Iraq. That makes Washington responsible, they say. Abdul Basit Turki Saeed, Iraq’s chief auditor, has warned U.S. officials that his government will go to court if necessary to recoup the missing money.

“Clearly Iraq has an interest in looking after its assets and protecting them,” said Samir Sumaidaie, Iraq’s ambassador to the United States.

This week was the first time we heard of publisher 505 Games’ Blackwater, an FPS that would cast you in the role of Blackwater Worldwide mercenaries.

The topic seemed thorny – the mercenary company, now renamed Xe Services, has been at the center of a multiple of controversies and the subject of highly critical Congressional hearings. Blackwater has been linked to the deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians, and the alcohol-fueled fatal shooting of a security guard in the employ of the country’s vice president. According to 505, the game was designed in consultation with former mercenary agents, and with Erik Prince, the founder and former head of the hot-button security contractor.

Blackwater is an on-rails shooter that has you alternating between the perspectives of four different mercenary soldiers, each with a certain specialization. In the portion of the game I experienced in the demo, I operated first as a commando, and later as a sniper. The game is a highly exaggerated, concentrated bit of Blackwater lore – it’s more Hollywood than Reuters. Set in North Africa, it concerns a high-tension conflict in which the Blackwater team must rescue a UN envoy that has been taken hostage by the operatives of a malicious warlord.

The coming months will tell how the world decides to regard Blackwater, when it arrives on the Xbox 360 supporting both Kinect and conventional gamepad-controls.

Note pre-9/11 (in red) and post-9/11 (in yellow) Debt.

This viewpoint from Ezra Klein in the Washington Post is one not discussed enough by the media and its pundits in our nearly decade-long “War on Terror” (except on a few occasions). Writes Klein in WashPo:

Did Osama bin Laden win? No. Did he succeed? Well, America is still standing, and he isn’t.

So why, when I called Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism expert who specializes in al-Qaeda, did he tell me that “bin Laden has been enormously successful”? There’s no caliphate. There’s no sweeping sharia law. Didn’t we win this one in a clean knockout?

Apparently not. Bin Laden, according to Gartenstein-Ross, had a strategy that we never bothered to understand, and thus that we never bothered to defend against. What he really wanted to do — and, more to the point, what he thought he could do — was bankrupt the United States of America. After all, he’d done the bankrupt-a-superpower thing before. And though it didn’t quite work out this time, it worked a lot better than most of us, in this exultant moment, are willing to admit.

Bin Laden’s transition from scion of a wealthy family to terrorist mastermind came in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was trying to conquer Afghanistan. Bin Laden was part of the resistance, and the resistance was successful — not only in repelling the Soviet invasion, but in contributing to the communist super-state’s collapse a few years later. “We, alongside the mujaheddin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt,” he later explained.

Read More from Ezra Klein in the Washington Post

Osama Bin Laden’s death caused most of America to break out the flags and head to the local town square to pat each other on the back saying “we got him.” Regardless of how we feel about the final execution of the modern world’s most notorious villain, capturing or killing Bin Laden was the impetus for the war in Afghanistan (remember, we originally went to war against the Taliban because they were harboring him).

Even though most Americans understand that the war in Iraq was never about the war against Al-Qaida, such a momentous occasion should give us pause to ask ourselves what exactly it is we’re doing fighting two wars and several smaller conflicts across the globe, and what exactly, continuing our course of action will accomplish:

What does Bin Laden’s death really change? We’ve already heard plenty of rhetoric that Bin Laden’s death does not end the war on terror. We’ve spent billions on GWOT since 2001, shed the blood of hundreds of thousands and invested our entire military industrial complex into it. While people will talk about how this is a symbolic victory, we’ll still be told that America must remain vigilant. Occupations will continue, drone attacks will continue, the loss of civil liberties at home will continue. We’ll continue to trade our freedom for a false sense of security. We’ll continue to justify torture, “collateral damage” (re: civilian deaths), and the concept of preemptive warfare.

Was it worth the price? Nearly 2500 servicemen and women died in Afghanistan in the past 10 years. More than 10,000 civilians have died since just 2007. In Iraq, nearly 4,500 servicemen and women have been killed and close to 1.5 million Iraqis have died because of the war and occupation. Since September 11th we’ve spent $1.3 trillion on warfare. That’s a hefty price tag for retribution of the actions of one man, or an organization that only 200 to 300 members left in Afghanistan. It’s been pointed out by plenty of experts that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan increased animosity towards the U.S. and helped Al-Qaida recruiting. We’re still living under constant threat of a shadowy attack and now should live in fear of a “lone wolf” style retaliatory attack.

Read the full post at Diatribe Media

This is a special Media Roots Radio interview conducted by Abby and Robbie Martin with two active duty soldiers in the army: Malcolm and Yossarian. Malcolm is a soldier enlisted in the US Army and serves as an aviation mechanic. Yossarian is an Apache helicopter pilot and military aviator in the US Army. They are both stationed abroad right now but were gracious enough to take some time out of their schedule to sit down on Skype for an interview with Media Roots. They talk about why they enlisted, how they woke up and give their perspectives on Bradley Manning, US foreign policy and 9/11 while expressing grave concerns for the future of this country.

They are also both contributing writers for Media Roots. Check out their op-ed writings in the Soldier’s Corner of the site. If you would like to directly download the podcast click the down arrow icon on the right of the soundcloud display. To hide the comments to enable easier rewind and fast forward, click on the icon on the very bottom right.

U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been causing huge civilian casualties with 63 percent of some 109,000 people killed in the Iraq war being civilians, according to a report on the U.S. human rights record released on Sunday.

The figures were quoted from a WikiLeaks trove by the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2010, which was released by the Information Office of China’s State Council in response to the country reports on Human Rights Practices for 2010 issued by the U.S. Department of State.

Figures from the WikiLeaks website also revealed up to 285,000 war casualties in Iraq from March 2003 through the end of 2009, according to the report.

“The U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and other regions have also brought tremendous casualties to local people,” said the report.

The report cited the notorious case on a “kill team” formed by five soldiers from the 5th Stryker Combat Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The team had committed at least three murders, where they randomly targeted and killed Afghan civilians, and dismembered the corpses and hoarded the human bones.

In addition, the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops had caused 535 Afghan civilian deaths and injuries in 2009. Among them 113 civilians were shot and killed, an increase of 43 percent over 2008, the report quoted McClatchy Newspapers as saying…

For more information, see original article.

Then things soured: greed pitted the friends against one another, all they could give the military were defective, Chinese-made munitions from Albania, and now Diveroli is in jail. Rolling Stone has the barely-believable saga:

Reassured by the e-mail, Packouz got into his brand-new blue Audi A4 and headed home for the evening, windows open, the stereo blasting. At 25, he wasn’t exactly used to the pressures of being an international arms dealer. Only months earlier, he had been making his living as a massage therapist; his studies at the Educating Hands School of Massage had not included classes in military contracting or geopolitical brinkmanship.

But Packouz hadn’t been able to resist the temptation when Diveroli, his 21-year-old friend from high school, had offered to cut him in on his burgeoning arms business. Working with nothing but an Internet connection, a couple of cellphones and a steady supply of weed, the two friends — one with a few college credits, the other a high school dropout — had beaten out Fortune 500 giants like General Dynamics to score the huge arms contract. With a single deal, two stoners from Miami Beach had turned themselves into the least likely merchants of death in history.

Read the rest at RollingStone.com.

Jessica Lynch is awarded the Bronze Star, Prisoner of War and Purple Heart medals.

This is just a sidenote, but it’s an interesting one about the propaganda used on Americans during the illegal invasion.

We all know about the Jessica Lynch story, and how the military waited to “rescue” her and her fellow Army mechanics from their Iraqi doctors (who were portrayed at the time as “terrorists” holding them hostage, instead of medical professionals giving them proper treatment under the Geneva Conventions) until they had a camera crew in place to record it all for propaganda purposes.

But what I hadn’t put together, was the TIMING of the revelation of that operation, and how it worked in conjunction with another event.

The same day that the Pentagon revealed this “heroic story” (which Jessica Lynch herself finds embarrassing, apparently not appreciating her role as a tool of propaganda), they had blasted the Palestine Hotel with a tank killing journalists there, and also killed another journalist in the process of blowing up the Al Jazeera studios.

So that night, the lead story in the American media wasn’t “Hey, they just killed our fellow journalists,” but rather it was Jessica Lynch, 24/7.

I heard this information in a documentary film called “Psy War” which was narrated/produced by the same folks who made the movie “The Corporation”, and has great clips from Howard Zinn, the people at PR Watch, Michael Parenti, etc. Russ Baker, the investigative journalist who wrote about the wackjob religious group “The Family” has praised this doc highly for what it’s research has revealed.

The filmmakers are inviting people to make copies of the film to give to their friends to make sure this gets distributed as widely as possible, and you can see it online here:

PSYWAR – Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPvOrjZRgwQ

PSYWAR – Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YStCvkGW4K4

PSYWAR – Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjtZSwWre4s

PSYWAR – Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqQbT1dvpVk

PSYWAR – Part 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1usQZBDcmSA

PSYWAR – Part 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPCy1jv1p3M

PSYWAR – Part 8: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajTl02A9VJA

Thoughts…?

Years of conflict in Iraq have left the country with more than one million war widows and a shortage of young unmarried men — pressures that may be bringing about the return of polygamy. Iraqi woman and child Politicians have suggested financial incentives for men who marry widows

Hanan lost eight members of her family in the war, including her husband, and was left to bring up three children alone.

The experience has not broken her. She continues to work as a hairdresser in her noisy and lively home on Haifa Street in Baghdad. But she still needs a “man-shelter”, she says — and this is why she ended up married to a married man.

“When he proposed to me, he said he was divorced,” she says. “But after we got married, he got back together with his first wife, because he has children with her.”

He now stays with Hanan once a week. But while she has only reluctantly accepted a situation where she shares a husband with another woman, some in Iraq are actively promoting the idea of polygamy.

Read More on BBC News

Coptic cross. Author: Sagredo (CC)

In the wake of the suicide bomb attack on the Coptic Christians in Egypt and the deadly October massacre at a Christian church in Iraq, Paul McGeough writes in the Sydney Morning Herald that Christians are rapidly leaving the Middle East altogether:

…A century ago, they accounted for 20 per cent of the population in the Middle East – today the Vatican estimates that proportion to be 5 per cent and falling in a region in which most regimes impose limits and restrictions on Christian rituals.

Iran has recently been rounding up Christian missionaries and deadly Christian-Muslim violence has erupted again in Nigeria.

“If this phenomenon continues, Christianity in the Middle East will disappear,” the Reverend Khalil Samir, an Egyptian Jesuit in Beirut, told reporters on the eve of a Vatican conference that discussed the crisis last year. “This is not an unreal hypothesis – Turkey went from 20 per cent Christian in the early 20th century to 0.2 per cent now. [And the flight from Iraq] could bleed the Church in Iraq dry.”

In the early 1950s, 20 per cent of Egyptians were Christian – today, at just 10 per cent of the population, they are the region’s biggest Christian community but they hold just three of the 508 seats in the parliament.

There was advance warning of the attack on the Alexandria church on an Islamic website, which Cairo initially blamed on al-Qaeda but which some Egyptian political analysts speculated might be the work of locals frustrated by an absence of substantive reform in Mubarak’s 30-year reign.

What emerges from the experience of the latest hot spots is that what is perceived to be a solution often creates a greater problem – that is, trying to deal with the crisis as a security challenge that can be dealt with in the short term.

A bare-knuckled crackdown on those who thrive amid the collapse of their social and political institutions, as in Pakistan, or the marginalisation and oppression of voices for reform, as in Egypt, tends to gloss over the reality that the root cause of the problem is elsewhere…

Would Muslims put up with this treatment in North America or Europe?

Arts & Crafts on the Victory Base Complex, Iraq Photo: Staff Sgt. Joy Pariante

Christmas isn’t always accompanied with holiday cheer, sometimes it comes with death threats. MSNBC reports:

Iraqi Christians on Wednesday called off Christmas festivities across the country as al-Qaida insurgents threatened more attacks on a beleaguered community still terrified from a bloody siege at a Baghdad church two months earlier.

A council representing Christian denominations across Iraq advised its followers to cancel public Christmas celebrations out of concern over new terror attacks and as a show of mourning for the victims of the church siege and other violence.

Church officials in the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul, the southern city of Basra and in the capital confirmed they will not put up Christmas decorations or hold evening Mass and have urged worshippers to refrain from decorating their homes.

Even an appearance by Santa Claus was called off.

“Nobody can ignore the threats of al-Qaida against Iraqi Christians,” said Chaldean Archbishop Louis Sako in Kirkuk. “We cannot find a single source of joy that makes us celebrate. The situation of the Christians is bleak.”

Christians across Iraq have been living in fear since a Baghdad church attack in October that left 68 people dead.

[Continues at MSNBC]

Halliburton’s senior executive in Iraq accused private security companies of operating a “mafia” to artifically inflate their “outrageous prices”, according to a US cable.

Written by a senior diplomat in the US’s Basra office, the confidential document discloses the tensions between private security firms, oil companies and the Iraqi government as coalition forces withdraw from protecting foreign business interests.

John Naland, head of the provincial reconstruction team in Basra, wrote in January this year that several oil company representatives complained of “unwarranted high prices” given an improving security situation since 2008.

“Halliburton Iraq country manager decried a ‘mafia’ of these companies and their ‘outrageous’ prices, and said that they also exaggerate the security threat.

“Apart from the high costs for routine trips, he claimed that Halliburton often receives what he says are ‘questionable’ reports of vulnerability of employees to kidnapping and ransom. He said that he recently saw an internal memo from their security company which tasked its employees to emphasize the persistent danger faced by IOCs [international oil companies].” Naland wrote.

The memo, written nine months after British troops handed over control of their base in Basra to the US army, does not name the Halliburton manager.

According to the cable, it cost around $6,000 (£3,900) to hire a security firm for four hours in Basra in January. A typical trip would include four security agents, drivers, and three or four armoured vehicles. A recent visit by a member of Iraq’s government from Baghdad to Basra and back cost about $12,000 (£7,800), the cable claimed…

Read more here.

Ron Paul, from a year and a half ago: “What if Obama has no intention of leaving Iraq? What if the American people learn the truth: that our foreign policy has nothing to do with national security, that it never changes from one administration to the next?”

And before you reactionaries react, Ron Paul spoke out against the Tea Party: See Ron Paul’s Shocking message to the Tea Party.

The UN has called on Barack Obama to order a full investigation of US forces’ involvement in human rights abuses in Iraq after a massive leak of military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes.

A map of parties to the UN Convention Against Torture, as compiled from the OHCHR's ratification list. Parties in dark green, countries which have signed but not ratified in light green, non-members in grey.

The call, by the UN’s chief investigator on torture, Manfred Nowak, came as Phil Shiner, human rights specialist at Public Interest Lawyers in the UK, warned that some of the deaths documented in the Iraq war logs could have involved British forces and would be pursued through the UK courts. He demanded a public inquiry into allegations that British troops were responsible for civilian deaths during the conflict.

The Guardian has analysed the 400,000 documents, the biggest leak in US military history, and found 15,000 previously unreported civilian deaths. The logs show how US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and generally unpunished.

Nowak said that if the files released through WikiLeaks pointed to clear violations of the UN Convention Against Torture the Obama administration had an obligation to investigate them.

The logs paint a disturbing picture of the relationship between US and Iraqi forces. Nowak said that UN human rights agreements obliged states to criminalise every form of torture, whether directly or indirectly, and to investigate any allegations of abuse.

Read more here.

Ilario Pantano (Ilario Pantano personal collection, CC)

The basic facts are undisputed: on 15 April 2004 Ilario Pantano, then a second lieutenant with the US marines, stopped and detained two Iraqi men in a car near Falluja.

The Iraqis were unarmed and the car found to be empty of weapons.Pantano ordered the two men to search the car for a second time and then, with no other US soldiers in view, unloaded a magazine of his M16A4 automatic rifle into them, before reloading and blasting a second magazine at them – some 60 rounds in total.

Over the corpses, he left a placard inscribed with the marine motto: “No better friend, No worse enemy.”

Six years later Pantano is on the verge of a stunning electoral victory that could send him to the US Congress in Washington. He is standing as Republican candidate in North Carolina’s 7th congressional district, which was last represented by his party in 1871.

With the help of the right-wing Tea Party movement, and with the benefit of his image as a war hero acquired from what happened on that fateful day in 2004, he has raised almost $1m (£630,000) in donations and is now level-pegging with his Democratic opponent, Mike McIntyre.

“We are in complete contention. We are certainly neck-and-neck. And we are feeling terrific,” he said at a Tea Party rally outside Wilmington.

Pantano is one of the new breed of hardline Republicans thrown up by the turmoil of the economic meltdown and the ensuing Tea Party explosion. He served in the first Gulf war, then worked for Goldman Sachs before rejoining the marines days after the 9/11 attacks.

A few months after he killed the two unarmed Iraqis, a member of his unit reported him to senior officers and he was charged with premeditated murder. At a pre-trial military hearing, prosecution witnesses testified that the detainees, Hamaady Kareem and Tahah Hanjil, were unthreatening and that their bodies were found in a kneeling position having apparently been shot in the back.

You’ll have to forgive me if I disbelieve the defense.  Read more here.

We’ve been told that 9/11 changed everything.

Is it true?

Let’s look:

• The Afghanistan war was planned before 9/11 (see this and this)

• The decision to launch the Iraq war was made before 9/11. Indeed, former CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted “crap” in its justifications for invading Iraq. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – who sat on the National Security Council – also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before9/11. And top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change one month after Bush took office

• Cheney apparently even made Iraqi’s oil fields a national security priority before 9/11

• The Patriot Act was planned before 9/11

• Cheney dreamed of giving the White House the powers of a monarch long before 9/11

• Cheney and Rumsfeld actively generated fake intelligence which exaggerated the threat from an enemy in order to justify huge amounts of military spending long before 9/11. And see this

• Cheney and the rest of the neocons lamented – before 9/11 – that America could not truly project its power globally without the justification of a “new Pearl Harbor”

• The government’s spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here and here. And see this)

• The decision to threaten to bomb Iran was made before 9/11

• The government knew that terrorists could use planes as weapons — and had even run its own drills of planes being used as weapons against the World Trade Center and other U.S. high-profile buildings, using REAL airplanes — all before 9/11

• The government heard the 9/11 plans from the hijackers’ own mouths before 9/11

• Cheney was in charge of all counter-terrorism programs for the United States before (and on) 9/11. See this Department of State announcement, this CNN article and this essay

• It was known long before 9/11 that torture doesn’t work to produce accurate intelligence, but is an effective way to terrorize people

So did 9/11 really “change everything”? Or was it simply an excuse to implement existing plans?

SEE ALSO: 5 Facts You Don’t Know About Spying

This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.

It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”.

This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.

And for the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future.