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What Every American Should Know About Iraq - CommonDreams.org * Right after 9/11, according to Clarke, “The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did this.’ Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’ But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this. I said, ‘Mr. President. We’ve done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There’s no connection.’ He came back at me and said, ‘Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection’. And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report. It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, ‘Will you sign this report?’ They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by ...

Annals of National Security: The General’s Report: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker Taguba came to believe that Lieutenant General Sanchez, the Army commander in Iraq, and some of the generals assigned to the military headquarters in Baghdad had extensive knowledge of the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib even before Joseph Darby came forward with the CD. Taguba was aware that in the fall of 2003—when much of the abuse took place—Sanchez routinely visited the prison, and witnessed at least one interrogation. According to Taguba, “Sanchez knew exactly what was going on.”

In Ethiopian desert, horrors of a hidden war - International Herald Tribune Ambaro, 25, now living in Addis Ababa, said she was gang-raped by five Ethiopian soldiers in January near the town of Fik. She said that troops came to her village every night to pluck another young woman. "I'm in pain now, all over my body," she said. "I'm worried that I'll become crazy because of what happened." Many Ogaden villagers said that when they had tried to bring up abuses with clan chiefs or the local authorities, they were told it was better to keep quiet. The rebels said this was precisely why they had attacked the Chinese oil field: to get publicity for their cause and the plight of their region (and to discourage foreign companies from exploiting local resources).

Rise and Fall of the Bizarro Empire- by Justin Raimondo When the history of the Iraq war is written, the question of who lost it and how it was lost will be paramount, yet the answer is clear enough even today. The seeds of defeat were sown long ago, and not just by the policymakers and authors of our present disastrous policy. The co-authors of defeat in Iraq are the politicians and the U.S. military, both of whom are constrained by the internal political dynamics of U.S. imperialism. The military deficiencies that some, like Sen. Harry Reid, have pointed to are not a matter of individual "incompetence" on the part of some generals: the inefficiencies are inherent in the system.