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By David K. Shipler
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
$18.45
$20
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More than seven months before Blackwater’s September killing spree, one of the company’s snipers shot and killed three Iraqi guards, who, witnesses said, never opened fire. A brief “investigation” by the State Department, which included no Iraqi witnesses or visits to the scene of the crime, found that the incident “fell within approved rules governing the use of force.”
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By Marie Cocco — Sheldon Whitehouse, new to the Senate, was searching for what he called a “moment of moral clarity.” Seated alongside the other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee in its crowded hearing room, the Rhode Island Democrat was looking in precisely the wrong place.
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849 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq this year, the deadliest for U.S. troops so far. While it’s true that the last couple of months have seen lower casualties than has been typical this year, those numbers cannot satisfactorily be explained by a more stable Iraq or some newfound love for Americans, and it would be grotesque to call the deaths of only 38 troops in October “good news.”
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The Pentagon is evaluating how it can streamline the process that allows recruits with criminal records to serve in the military. The proposed action is the latest in a series of cash bonuses and relaxed requirements that are meant to help the military cope with its recruitment problem. We can think of a much more effective measure to get young men and women to sign up for military service: End the war in Iraq.
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By Marie Cocco — In the beginning—back when most Americans believed Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, when Rumsfeld was known for his quick verbal jabs and not the quagmire in Iraq, and when Bush still could hope to be revered as a great wartime president—the women of Code Pink would stand quietly in front of the White House and hope someone would take their fliers.
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Since its early days in 2001, the Bush White House has kept the press at arm’s length, but for his new biography of George W. Bush, “Dead Certain,” GQ’s Robert Draper managed to catch a close enough glimpse of the president to confirm that his enduring “obstinate” qualities have impacted the course of world events.
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cbsnews.com
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Meet Rafid Ahmed Alwan, otherwise known as “Curve Ball” in intelligence circles. He’s an Iraqi defector who apparently won himself a green card with his fabricated claims about Saddam Hussein’s regime harboring biological weapons, which became the CIA’s (and Colin Powell’s) key justification for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
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The Mosaic Intelligence Report takes a look at the United States’ Kurdish double standard: Washington supports those in Iraq while declaring Kurdish fighters in Turkey a “common enemy.”
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The Washington Post has obtained a number of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s “snowflakes,” curt memos fired off at a rate of up to 60 a day. The documents offer rare, unpolished insight into one of the principal architects of the Iraq war, who “argued that Muslims avoid ‘physical labor’ and wrote of the need to ‘keep elevating the threat,’ ‘link Iraq to Iran’ and develop ‘bumper sticker statements’ to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war.”
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AP photo / Junji Kurokawa
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By Robert Scheer — Not to stoke any of the inane conspiracy theories running wild on the Internet, but if Osama bin Laden wasn’t on the payroll of Lockheed-Martin or some other large defense contractor, he deserves to have been. What a boondoggle 9/11 has been for the merchants of war, who this week announced yet another quarter of whopping profits made possible by George Bush’s pretending to fight terrorism by throwing money at outdated Cold War-style weapons systems.
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Perhaps this could be a diversionary tactic: On Tuesday, President Bush criticized the House and Senate for, it would seem, holding his administration accountable for its actions at home and overseas and looking for ways to bring our troops home.
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By Marie Cocco — Though time will certainly tell, the Bush administration so far has not yet surpassed that of Richard Nixon’s in its contempt for a free press and its unrelenting war on the truth.
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Historians may one day debate Rudy Giuliani’s recent preposterous comments at a New Hampshire town hall meeting. “Did he mean it?” they might ask. “Or was he just dehydrated?” While addressing voters, the candidate said that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were debating whether to invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Osama bin Laden to their inaugurations. But wait, there’s more.
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Dario Castillejos, Dario La Crisis —
Posted on Oct 29, 2007
READ MORE 
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chinadaily.com.cn
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Three senior law enforcement officials have revealed to the Associated Press that the State Department gave all of the Blackwater guards involved in the Sept. 16 killing of 17 Iraqi civilians immunity from prosecution.
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AP photo / Wisam Sami
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Here’s a good way we can all support our troops: by listening to them when they tell us how the Iraq war is really going. Take this account from Sgt. Victor Alarcon and others in his battalion, who in Saturday’s Washington Post give their frank, and stark, assessment of the situation in Baghdad’s Sadiyah district.
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The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years, a figure that includes interest for putting war costs on the proverbial credit card. To date, the two conflicts have cost more (adjusted for inflation) than the Korean and Vietnam wars combined.
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By Eugene Robinson — An impotent GOP is beating up immigrants, sick kids and foreign countries in the feeble hope that grateful voters will stick it to the Democrats next year.
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By Ellen Goodman — Those who went to the Values Voter Summit left without a candidate to call their own. But the lack of a golden boy isn’t their only problem: There are signs of ideological rigor mortis among the old guard.
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Here’s footage from Wednesday’s dramatic confrontation on Capitol Hill between a Code Pink anti-war activist with faux blood on her hands and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose hands are stained, according to the protester, with the “blood of millions of Iraqis.”
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Boy, is al-Qaida ever busy these days! In addition to threatening U.S. troops in Iraq, running riot in the hinterlands of Pakistan and generally requiring huge amounts of money and the potential sacrifice of thousands of lives to thwart its infiltration on several fronts, al-Qaida might even be behind the wildfires currently plaguing Southern California, according to “Fox and Friends.”
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The State Department will implement new measures to guard against a repeat of last month’s Blackwater slaughter of 17 Iraqi civilians, but some of the new rules, including more cultural awareness training, feel like a Band-Aid on a serious head wound. In addressing this issue, the Iraqi government has chosen to make a point of its sovereignty, and so far the U.S. has done little to allay the Iraqi concerns.
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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By Robert Scheer — Hey, a billion here, a billion there, who’s counting? Not the State Department, which admitted this week that it can’t say “specifically what it received” for the $1.2 billion it paid DynCorp, ostensibly to train the Iraqi police—other than that somebody got an Olympic-size swimming pool out of the deal.
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Former Sen. Mike Gravel’s campaign released this video after the candidate was barred from NBC’s upcoming debate in Philadelphia. Is it just a coincidence that the network is owned by GE, which has a profit incentive for war? Gravel doesn’t seem to think so.
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AP photo / Haraz N. Ghanbari, file
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A new book by two ACLU lawyers, “Administration of Torture,” includes documents in which one Gen. Michael Dunlavey claims that President Bush gave him “marching orders” to get the Pentagon’s approval of more severe interrogation methods at Guantanamo. Also, it alleges that then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was “personally involved” in the interrogation of Mohammed al Qahtani.
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aftonbladet.se
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The White House’s latest request ($46 billion) for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was greeted with fighting words by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid: “President Bush should not expect Congress to rubber-stamp his latest supplemental request. We’re not going to do that.” For those keeping track at home, Bush has now asked for $196.4 billion so far for the budget year that began in October.
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AP photo / Caleb Jones
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Adding fuel to the fire from President Bush’s “World War III” comment about the threat a nuclear-equipped Iran would pose to the world, Vice President Dick Cheney said on Sunday that the U.S. and like-minded nations “will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” However, Cheney was less than clear about exactly how this nuke-thwarting process might take place.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Scott Ritter — The former intelligence officer and weapons inspector argues that the president’s recent World War III comment offers some rare insight into the highly secretive world of George W. Bush’s White House, where the leader of the free world gets advice from reckless neoconservatives, “war criminal” Dick Cheney and “God.”
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By Will Durst — Funnyman Durst sends up the absurd criticism of Al Gore and the Nobel Prize. Why stop at global warming when there’s plenty in the world of science and nature to deny?
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washingtontimes.com
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In her new memoir, former CIA officer Valerie Plame tells of her shock as the Bush administration presented evidence in 2003 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction—“I knew key parts of it were wrong,” she says—as well as her take on her outing as a CIA employee.
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After the House failed to override Bush’s veto of the SCHIP children’s health care renewal bill on Thursday, Rep. Pete Stark berated the administration and the bill’s opponents. In light of their attitude, he questioned whether the nation’s kids would “grow old enough for you to send [them] to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement.”
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nytimes.com
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Determined to show just how adolescent they can be, U.S. representatives in Baghdad have expressed dissatisfaction and suspicion over a pair of power plants that Iranian and Chinese companies plan to build in Iraq. One American military official described the contracts this way: “As you know, it’s not always as it appears.”
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sunsearch.info
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The Turkish parliament has authorized military incursions into Iraq in order to track down rebels who, the Turkish government has long claimed, use Iraqi Kurdistan as sanctuary.
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AP photo / Hamza Hendawi
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By Robert Scheer — When will we listen to the troops? I’m not talking about soldiers used as props for a George Bush photo op, telling reporters what Washington wants to hear. The Iraq war has produced brilliant messages of dissent from the ranks that should cause us to stop in our tracks and reconsider what we have wrought.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — One of the few things the Republican and Democratic presidential contests have in common is the relentlessness with which candidates on both sides are wrapping themselves in orthodoxy. Heretics need not apply.
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By Robert Fisk — I’m not at all certain that the CIA did not have a scam drugs heist on board and I am not at all sure that the diminutive Libyan agent Megrahi—ultimately convicted on the evidence of the memory of a Maltese tailor—really arranged to plant the bomb on board Pan Am Flight 103 in December 1988.
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Frank Rich of The New York Times argues that although there’s plenty to blame on the Bush administration, a timid Congress and a compliant press, it’s time for the American people to accept at least some responsibility for the Iraq war and its many disastrous episodes. From Abu Ghraib to contractor killing sprees, we the people have known far too much for far too long to feign surprise when things suddenly go sour.
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AP photo
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By Chris Hedges — The Bush administration has called for the respect of human rights in Burma, a pretty safe piece of posturing, but it remains silent as Egypt’s dictator, Gen. Hosni Mubarak, unleashes the largest crackdown on public opposition in over a decade. Our moral indignation over the shooting of monks masks the incestuous and growing alliance we have built in the so-called war on terror with some of the world’s most venal dictatorships.
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wikipedia.org
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Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former top commander in Iraq, has issued a devastating critique of the “incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders” in planning and executing the Iraq war, which he called a “catastrophic failure.” Sanchez also warned that the president’s “surge” might “stave off defeat” but will not lead to victory.
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Eric Lee / Paramount Classics via NYT
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Al Gore and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their crusade against global warming. Now, just imagine what would happen if the Nobel laureate applied himself with equal intensity to ending the war in Iraq. That could be the beginning of a thrilling presidential campaign.
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inthesetimes.com
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Fifteen Iraqi women and children found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time Thursday when the U.S. launched a series of airstrikes to back up ground operations targeting suspected insurgents.
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4president.org
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How does the Bush family, including First Twin Jenna Bush, handle all the critical media coverage about George W.? According to Jenna, they “don’t watch too much television.” And, when asked by Time reporter Carolyn Sayre why she isn’t serving in Iraq, she insisted, ” ... It’s not even a practical question.” Oh.
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AP photo / LM Otero
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James Harris and Josh Scheer —
Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Philip Coyle knows a thing or two about the “staggering” amounts of money the U.S. funnels into the military-industrial complex, and why it is so difficult to stanch the profiteering.
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cnn.com
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Jimmy Carter was en fuego during a chat with Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday, blasting the Bush administration for torturing people, the GOP candidates for racing to the fringe and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for refusing to commit to a full withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
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AP Photo
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Two women were shot and killed on Tuesday when private security contractors guarding a convoy of four cars in Baghdad’s Karrada neighborhood opened fire on the women’s Oldsmobile as it moved toward the convoy. Unfortunately, it was not the day’s only violent episode in Iraq. According to The Washington Post, a series of bombings claimed at least 34 lives in and around Baghdad.
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Another Memorial Day in This Endless War
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