Tomgram: Bush's Free World and Welcome to It: "'I saw women and children jump out of their cars and start to crawl on the road to escape being shot, but still the firing kept coming and many of them were killed. I saw a boy of about 10 leaping in fear from a minibus, he was shot in the head. His mother was crying out for him, she jumped out after him, and she was killed. People were afraid.' This is the testimony of Hassan Jabar Salman, a lawyer 'shot four times in the back, his car riddled with eight more bullets' as he attempted to escape a fusillade from Blackwater hired guns guarding a U.S. convoy in the middle of Baghdad. Only the latest of many Blackwater 'incidents,' 'Bloody Sunday' -- depending on which report you read, between eight and 28 Iraqi men, women, and children died -- brought into sharper focus the Free World that L. Paul Bremer III had helped create at the behest of his President."
Broken Spring? : Information Clearing House This is a sequel to my June 2011 article, ‘After the spring’, on the upheavals in the Arab world. It is an article that has been painful to write, because it brings bad tidings and offers a pessimistic analysis of the upheavals, at least in the short term, in a number of Arab countries. The outcomes and potential outcomes of these uprisings have also acquired new, very significant dimensions. These include a complex entanglement with the accelerated preparations for a possible attack on Iran, and a poisonous, sectarian aspect that could have the consequence of ripping Syria and the Middle East apart.
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