How Two Bumbling Stoner Kids Became The Pentagon’s Favorite Arms Dealers
It sounds like the plot of a John Hughes ’80s teen comedy. Efraim Diveroli and David Packouz were a pair of underachieving kids from Miami (interests: football, “whisky”, and “chilling with the boyz”) until, as part of the privatization effort, they somehow landed a $300 million contract from the Bush administration to provide ammunition for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
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…
‘PSYWAR’: Connecting The Dots In Iraq
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…
Iraqi Defector Comes Clean About His WMD Lies
Meet Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, CIA codename Curveball. He lied about Saddam Hussein’s having biological weapons, giving the Bush administration the ammunition they needed in their push for an invasion of Iraq. Al-Janabi says he would do it all over again if he could — the lesson being, don’t trust anyone named Curveball.
Iraq Toys With Polygamy As Solution For War Widows
Roula Ayoubi reports for BBC News:
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…
Christians Are Being Violently Pushed Out Of Middle East
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…
Iraqi Christians Cancel Christmas
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…
WikiLeaks Revelation: Iraq Security Firms Operate ‘Mafia’ to Inflate Prices
From the Guardian:
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…
What If Ron Paul Was The Shit?
Here’s something you won’t hear from the mainstream anytime soon…
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.
UN Calls on Obama to Investigate Human Rights Abuses
From the Guardian:
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…
Veteran Who Killed Unarmed Iraqis Wins Tea Party Support
Ilario Pantano (Ilario Pantano personal collection, CC)
Ed Pilkington writes in the The Guardian:
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,…
Wikileaks Iraq War Logs: Every Death Mapped
Simon Rogers reports in the Guardian: “The Wikileaks Iraq war logs provide us with a unique picture of every death in Iraq. These are those events mapped using Google Fusion tables.”
Did 9/11 Really “Change Everything”?
From WASHINGTON’S BLOG:
We’ve been told that 9/11 changed everything.
Is it true?
Let’s look:
- 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…
A History Of The Iraq War, Through Wikipedia Edits
Here’s how you write history in the contentious twenty-first century. Every edit made to the Wikipedia page The Iraq War, published as a bound, multi-volume set. Via booktwo:
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…
Jon Stewart is the First “Journalist” To Hold Tony Blair Accountable for His Iraq War Position (Video)
Watch the whole thing online (wasn’t aired on TV) and decide. Just because he has a new book out Stewart and The Daily Show are doing the job the American mainstream media should be doing:
Saddam Is Gone, But Tyranny Remains
Amnesty International recently reported that it believes 30,000 people are currently held in Iraqi jails, and the same kinds of abuses that went on under Saddam and American forces are still going on. From Al Jazeera:
Amnesty’s 59-page report, titled “New Order, Same Abuses: Unlawful detentions and torture in Iraq,” highlights the case of several men who were subjected to torture or who died in prison.
Among them was Riad Mohammed Saleh al-Oqaibi, arrested in September 2009 and held in a detention facility in Baghdad’s heavily-fortified Green Zone before being transferred to a secret detention facility elsewhere in the capital.
“During interrogation, he is said to have been beaten so hard on the chest that his ribs were broken and his liver damaged,” the report noted. “He died on 12 or 13 February as a result of internal bleeding.”
According to the rights group, methods of torture used against detainees include beatings with cables…
William Blum on What Americans Should Not Forget About the Iraq War
William Blum writes on Killing Hope:
“They’re leaving as heroes. I want them to walk home with pride in their hearts,” declared Col. John Norris, the head of a US Army brigade in Iraq.
It’s enough to bring tears to the eyes of an American, enough to make him choke up.
Enough to make him forget.
But no American should be allowed to forget that the nation of Iraq, the society of Iraq, have been destroyed, ruined, a failed state. The Americans, beginning 1991, bombed for 12 years, with one excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, killed wantonly, tortured … the people of that unhappy land have lost everything — their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women’s…
Tony Blair Nearly Hit With Shoes and Eggs at Dublin Book Signing (Video)
Via Russia Today:
Police scuffled with demonstrators in Ireland’s capital, Dublin, as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived at a bookstore to sign copies of his memoirs. A shoe, eggs and other projectiles were thrown toward Blair as he emerged from his car, but they did not hit him. At one point, a policeman and demonstrator crashed to the ground as officers struggled to control the protesters, who were demonstrating against Blair’s actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East. The protesters were heard chanting “Tony Blair: war criminal” as his car arrived at Eason’s book store.
President Obama on Leaving Iraq (Then and Now)
This evening, President Obama will announce the end of the combat mission in Iraq as well as the reduction of the number of troops in Middle East during a primetime news conference at 8:00 p.m. EST. Below is a replay of the speech:
Now here is a fun exercise for those interested in the intersection of power and language. Remember when Candidate Obama was against “dumb wars” in 2002? Below is a 2008 presidential campaign video made with then Presidential Candidate Obama’s own words:
Cancer Rate in Fallujah Worse than Hiroshima
You can’t drop massive amounts of depleted uranium on a nation without causing severe radiation poisoning. It’s one of the worst legacies of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and criminally under-reported by the embedded media. The fallout is starting to be noticed now, however, as reported by the Centre for Global Research:
The Iraqi city of Fallujah continues to suffer the ghastly consequences of a US military onslaught in late 2004.
According to the authors of a new study, “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009,” the people of Fallujah are experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia, infant mortality, and sexual mutations than those recorded among survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the years after those Japanese cities were incinerated by US atomic bomb strikes in 1945.
The epidemiological study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Studies and Public Health (IJERPH), also finds the prevalence of these conditions in Fallujah…
