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Showing posts from August 9, 2008

The tragic last moments of Margaret Hassan - Robert Fisk, Commentators - The Independent

The tragic last moments of Margaret Hassan - Robert Fisk, Commentators - The Independent : "For some in the Al Jazeera studios these archives are intensely personal. 'I trained Ali Khatib – he was a great reporter,' I am told. 'The war was almost declared at an end in Iraq and he went out with our cameraman to cover some story and, while he's approaching an American checkpoint, you can hear an American soldier on the tape say 'Stop – you have to go back'. And then the soldier just shot at them and killed both of them. Ali had got married two weeks earlier.' For some, the videotapes will always be too much. When I met Margaret's husband Tahseen in his Baghdad home after her murder, he was a picture of courage and mourning. There were terrible times. 'I would come home and sit here and weep,' he told me then. 'I would sit here sometimes and go out of my mind crying and sobbing. I don't think insurgents did this. I don't think Iraqi

The US Government Is the Real Bioterror Threat - by Ivan Eland

The US Government Is the Real Bioterror Threat - by Ivan Eland Assuming the federal government has, after almost seven years, finally identified the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks in 2001 – admittedly a generous assumption given that for most of those years, it pursued, hounded, embarrassed, and ruined the career of the wrong man – larger dangers remain. As is normally the case with issues surrounding terrorism, the average citizen will probably be shocked to learn that their government is often a bigger threat than the terrorists. Remember the CIA's creation of the 9/11 threat by supporting the most radical Islamist groups fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s and then the U.S. government's provocation of terrorist attacks from those same militants by its non-Islamic military presence in Islamic Persian Gulf countries in the 1990s, which had continued unnecessarily subsequent to the first Gulf War. Similarly, in the case of bioterrorism, the threat from the