Camp Bucca, Abu Ghraib and the Rise of Extremism in Iraq

October 28, 2019

Yesterday morning, President Trump announced the death of Abu Bakr Al- Baghdadi and three of his children.

President Trump said Al-Baghdadi, the founder of ISIS, was fleeing U.S. military forces, in a tunnel, and then killed himself by detonating a suicide vest he wore.

In 2004, Al-Baghdadi had been captured by U.S. forces and, for ten months, imprisoned in both Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca.

I visited Camp Bucca in January, 2004 when, still under construction, the Camp was a network read more

US’s sordid history of betraying minority groups that do its fighting: Sure Trump is ‘Betraying the Kurds!’ but What’s New about That?

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is attacking President Trump for pulling US troops out of Syria, where they’ve been engaging in an illegal and bloody war against the Syrian government and its military for at least five years (not counting the three prior years when the US was providing arms and training to Syrian rebels, including groups associated with Al Qaeda).

McConnell and other Republicans, as well as most leading Democrats, are calling Trump’s move “precipitous” despite the years US troops have been fighting in Syria, and like McConnell are saying his decision is “benefitting Russia, Iran and the Assad regime,” and is a “betrayal” of America’s ally in Syria, the armed Kurdish minority.

For starters, I would argue that pretty much anything that McConnell is opposed to — such as a US military withdrawal from Syria, an improvement in US-Iranian relations, an end to the US-backed Saudi war on Yemen or an end to the state of war between the US and North Korea — is almost by definition a good thing.

In fact, I would argue that, regardless of Trump’s despicable character, personal lack of ethics or morality, his racism, sociopathy and fascist proclivities, and his willful efforts to destroy the biosphere, this bat-shit crazy president has done at least two good things: calling off an aerial blitz on Iran and deciding to pull US troops out of the Syrian civil war.

Craven Democrats who call for more war in Syria and for a war footing towards Iran, who back a new Cold War with Russia, and who apparently would prefer a nuclear North Korea to talks with that country’s ruling tyrant, all simply because Trump seems to want the opposite, are the enemies of peace, regardless of the dangers posed by the current damaged and unstable denizen of the White House

Probably the silliest claim, trumpeted by Republicans and Democrats alike and by our leading news organizations, is that…

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/4546-2/ 

Really remembering 9-11: Recalling the Hundreds of Thousands of Civilian Victims of America’s Endless ‘War on Terror’

By Dave Lindorff

Now that the flags are back waving from the tops of flagpoles across the country, and the maudlin paeans to the close to 3000 lives lost in the airplane attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, it’s time we gave a thought to the dead who were ignored.

According to very conservative estimates, as reported by the “Costs of War” project of Brown University’s Watson Institute on International and Public Affairs, nearly 250,000 civilians have been killed during the a8 years since September 2001 in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan in wars or attacks that were instigated by the United States.

Those are very conservative figures carefully compiled by organizations like Iraq Body Count, the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies. These numbers are people known to have died in the violence of war, mostly as so-called “collateral damage,” but often deliberately, as when the US bombs a hospital, a wedding or a private housing compound in order to kill some targeted individual considered an “enemy combatant,” unconcerned about the others in the area, often women and children, who are almost certain to die or suffer serious injury as the result of a strike.

The numbers do not include the deaths that also stem from America’s post 9-11 wars — things like starvation, deaths from lack of medical care, and especially deaths from diseases like typhus or dysentery caused by lack of access to clean water or adequate sanitation facilities.

It is scandalous that the US government does not publish accurate information about the mayhem and slaughter that its wars have caused, especially because it is precisely because of the US extensive use of airpower, including remotely piloted drones as a means of keeping politically dangerous US military casualties in the so-called “War on Terror” at a minimum that produce so many civilian casualties.

Reporters who want to learn about civilian casualties from these US wars must either take the dangerous step of going to the battle zones without US official backing (what is called embedding with American forces — a set-up that keeps the military in control of access and message), or rely on reports from NGOs that monitor such things.

According to some accounts, civilian deaths caused by America’s permanent war in the Middle East since 2001 could exceed one million.

 

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening, the uncompromised, collectively run, seven-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/recalling-the-hundreds-of-thousands-of-civilian-victims-of-americas-endless-war-on-terror/

 

 

Credit where credit’s due: Trump Does Something Right for Once

By Dave Lindorff

It’s entertaining to read and watch the collective horror being expressed in the US media and the Congress as President Trump unexpectedly calls for a quick end to US military involvement in Syria, where for years US forces and CIA-trained fighters have been wreaking havoc and death and sowing chaos in a doomed effort to oust Syrian dictator Basher al-Assad from power.

There’s the New York Times, still grimly trying to gin read more

Sy Hersh, Exposer of My Lai and Abu Ghraib, Strikes Again, Exposing US Lies About Alleged Assad Sarin ‘Attack’

By Dave Lindorff

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, the journalist who exposed the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese women, children and old people by US troops, the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal in Iraq, and many other critically important stories, has now obliterated the US government’s (and the US media’s) claim that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s military killed nearly 100 people with a Sarin nerve gas read more