War. Tv. Wikileaks reveals video showing US air crew shooting down Iraqi civilians | World news. A secret video showing US air crew falsely claiming to have encountered a firefight in Baghdad and then laughing at the dead after launching an air strike that killed a dozen people, including two Iraqis working for Reuters news agency, was revealed by Wikileaks today. The footage of the July 2007 attack was made public in a move that will further anger the Pentagon, which has drawn up a report identifying the whistleblower website as a threat to national security.
The US defence department was embarrassed when that confidential report appeared on the Wikileaks site last month alongside a slew of military documents. The release of the video from Baghdad also comes shortly after the US military admitted that its special forces attempted to cover up the killings of three Afghan women in a raid in February by digging the bullets out of their bodies. The newly released video of the Baghdad attacks was recorded on one of two Apache helicopters hunting for insurgents on 12 July 2007. Iraq's new order evolves - The National Newspaper. Today's Pictures: The Capture of Saddam Hussein. Produced by Zena Koo Magnum In Motion The Capture of Saddam Hussein Interactive Essay 2008 Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLCUser Agreement and Privacy Policy | All rights reserved. Fertile Crescent 'will disappear this century' - environment - 27 July 2009. Is it the final curtain for the Fertile Crescent?
This summer, as Turkish dams reduce the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to a trickle, farmers abandon their desiccated fields across Iraq and Syria, and efforts to revive the Mesopotamian marshes appear to be abandoned, climate modellers are warning that the current drought is likely to become permanent. The Mesopotamian cradle of civilisation seems to be returning to desert. Last week, Iraqi ministers called for urgent talks with upstream neighbours Turkey and Syria, after the combination of a second year of drought and dams in those countries cut flow on the Euphrates as it enters Iraq to below 250 cubic metres a second. That is less than a quarter the flow needed to maintain Iraqi agriculture. Tensions have been growing since May, when the Iraqi parliament refused to approve a new much-needed trade deal with Turkey unless it contained binding clauses on river flows.
Paradise lost The marshes were deliberately drained by Saddam Hussein. Informed Comment: Cheney Worries about Wasting the Sacrifices made in Iraq on behalf of Big Oil. Dick Cheney reacted to the cessation of unilateral US patrols of major cities in Iraq, saying that he had concerns that the “insurgents” might launch more attacks and that “I would not want to see the U.S. waste all the tremendous sacrifice that has gotten us to this point.” First of all, Cheney didn’t make any sacrifices in Iraq. He deferred his own military service five times because he ‘had other things to do.’ The ‘sacrifices’ were caused because he purveyed falsehoods to the US public in order to get up that war, hinting around that Saddam was in bed with Usama Bin Laden and telling senators that Iraq was two years away from having a nuclear bomb.
So the sacrifices were of other people’s children, and his role was merely that of an Aztec high priest cutting the heart out of the victims. Second of all, from the dawn of time until 2003, there had never been a suicide bombing in Iraq. Third, Cheney’s own administration (it was Bush-Cheney, remember Dick?) Leopold writes,
Informed Comment: Cheney's Mission Accomplished. Dick Cheney: “I guess my general sense of where we are with respect to Iraq and at the end of now, what, nearly six years, is that we’ve accomplished nearly everything we set out to do….” What has Dick Cheney really accomplished in Iraq? An estimated 4 million Iraqis, out of 27 million, have been displaced from their homes, that is, made homeless. Some 2.7 million are internally displaced inside Iraq. A couple hundred thousand are cooling their heels in Jordan. And perhaps a million are quickly running out of money and often living in squalid conditions in Syria.
Cheney’s war has left about 15% of Iraqis homeless inside the country or abroad. That would be like 45 million American thrown out of their homes. . $32 billion were wasted on Iraq reconstruction, and most of it cannot even be traced.