New Hampshire Health News Digest

FOXNews.com - Politics - Pentagon: China Re-Strategizes After Iraq WASHINGTON — The speed with which U.S. ground forces captured Baghdad and the prominent role played in Iraq by U.S. commandos, have led China to rethink how it could counteract the American military in the event of a confrontation over Taiwan, the Pentagon says. The Chinese also believe, partly from its assessment of the Bush administration's declared war on terrorism, that the United States is increasingly likely to intervene in a conflict over Taiwan or other Chinese interests, according to the Pentagon analysis. "Authoritative commentary and speeches by senior officials suggest that U.S. actions over the past decade ... have reinforced fears within the Chinese leadership that the United States would appeal to human rights and humanitarian concerns to intervene, either overtly or covertly," said the Pentagon. The assessments are in an annual Defense Department report to Congress on Chines...

OpinionJournal - Featured Article : "One thing we've learned about Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein is that the former dictator was a diligent record keeper. Coalition forces have found--literally--millions of documents. These papers are still being sorted, translated and absorbed, but they are already turning up new facts about Saddam's links to terrorism. We realize that even raising this subject now is politically incorrect. It is an article of faith among war opponents that there were no links whatsoever--that 'secular' Saddam and fundamentalist Islamic terrorists didn't mix. But John Ashcroft's press conference yesterday reminds us that the terror threat remains, and it seems especially irresponsible for journalists not to be open to new evidence. If the CIA was wrong about WMD, couldn't it have also missed Saddam's terror links? One striking bit of new evidence is that the name Ahmed Hikmat Shakir appears on three captured rosters o...

Yahoo! News - Libyan Nuclear Devices Missing : "The whereabouts of the parts is one of several mysteries that has preoccupied officials involved in the biggest investigation of nuclear smuggling in history -- the probe into the black-market network led by former Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. U.S. and U.N. investigators have identified many of the network's operatives and methods and recovered tens of thousands of parts in a dragnet that has reached from Southeast Asia to the Middle East and Europe. Yet, the investigators believe that some of the suppliers to the network have not yet been identified -- and perhaps some customers, as well. 'We haven't gotten to the bottom of the story,' acknowledged one senior Bush administration official involved in the investigation. 'We continue to look for, and expect to make, new discoveries. We don't think the story is fully revealed yet.' Unraveling the network and recovering missing parts ...

Yahoo! News - Militants Kill 10 in Saudi Arabia Complex KHOBAR, Saudi Arabia - Suspected Islamic militants sprayed gunfire inside two oil industry compounds on the Persian Gulf, killing at least 10 people — including one American — before taking at least 50 hostages at an expatriate residential complex. Saudi security forces seeking to kill or capture the militants stormed the walled, waterfront Oasis complex, where a housing manager said 50 hostages were still being held including Americans, Italians and Arabs. A police officer at the scene told The Associated Press that Saudi forces had surrounded the attackers on the sixth floor of a high-rise building inside the luxurious compound. Saudi Arabia's scheme to export terrorism from their country seems to be backfiring.

Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, by Thomas L. Friedman : Excerpt from... Longitudes and Attitudes Exploring the World After September 11 Prologue: The Super-Story "The cold war system was characterized by one overarching feature -- and that was division. That world was a divided-up, chopped-up place, and whether you were a country or a company, your threats and opportunities in the cold war system tended to grow out of who you were divided from. Appropriately, this cold war system was symbolized by a single word -- wall, the Berlin Wall. The globalization system is different. It also has one overarching feature -- and that is integration. The world has become an increasingly interwoven place, and today, whether you are a company or a country, your threats and opportunities increasingly derive from who you are connected to. This globalization system is also characterized by a single word -- web, the World Wide Web. So in the broadest ...

The Australian: 'Terrorists' lead Sadr militia [May 29, 2004] : "Terrorists' lead Sadr militia From correspondents in Najaf, Iraq May 29, 2004 THE militia of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is led by former loyalists of ousted president Saddam Hussein and 'terrorists', a spokesman for one of Iraq's main Shi'ite parties said today. 'The leadership of the Mehdi Army has been infiltrated by Baathists and terrorists and we have a list of their names,' Sheikh Qassem al-Hashimi, of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), told reporters. 'This group planned the assassination attempt against Sayed (honorific) Saddredin al-Kubbanji yesterday and it is the same group that killed Sayed Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim and Sayed Abdul Majid al-Khoei.' Kubbanji, the Najaf-based representative of SCIRI, escaped unscathed an attempt on his life yesterday as he finished giving the weekly sermon at the Imam Ali...

Reuters News Article Governing Body, U.S. Pick CIA Link Allawi as Iraqi PM : "BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iyad Allawi, a former member of Saddam Hussein's Baath party who then worked with the CIA to topple him, was chosen as prime minister of Iraq Friday. Charged with taking over from the U.S. occupation authority on June 30 and leading his country to its first free elections next year, his nomination emerged from a unanimous consensus at a meeting of the 25 U.S. appointees on Iraq's Governing Council. United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, whom Washington asked to help shape a new Iraqi government, welcomed the choice of the British-educated, Shi'ite neurologist through a spokesman. It was unclear how far U.S. officials or Brahimi influenced the choice of a long-time exile known to few Iraqis and whom people in Baghdad said was an outsider they could not trust. Brahimi and Iraq's U.S. governor Paul Bremer endorsed the nomination, Governing Council member ...

Suicide U.: Iran registers volunteers for martyrdom -WorldTribune.com Iran has established what could be the first training center for Islamic suicide attackers. Iranian sources and media asserted that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has established a center to train suicide attackers throughout the world. The sources identified the center as the World Islamic Martyrs and Fighters Staff Headquarters. The facility was said to have been established by the IRGC's intelligence service, responsible for the sponsorship and support of Islamic insurgency groups linked to Teheran. The groups have included Hamas, Hizbullah, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. The existence of the center was first reported on May 26 by the state-operated Iranian Student News Agency, Middle East Newsline reported. On Friday, a similar version was published by the London-based daily A-Sharq Al Awsat in an article by Iranian analyst Ali Nouri Zadeh....

Belmont Club : "It is a measure of how strange the world has become that Lt. Col. Robert R. Leonhard, U.S.A. (ret) writes in the Army Magazine about how situations similar to Wong's satirical scenario will become the rule rather than the exception (Hat tip, reader MIG). Col. Leonhard argues that Sun Tzu's maxim to fight in cities 'only when there is no alternative' is hopelessly outdated because there is nowhere else to fight. We do not live in Sun Tzu?'s world, nor even in that of Clausewitz, Fuller or Liddell Hart. The modern world has urbanized to an unprecedented degree, and it is inconceivable that future military contingencies will not involve urban operations. Sun Tzu lived and wrote (if indeed he was a real person) in the agrarian age, when most of the land was either wilderness or cultivated. Large segments of the population lived outside cities, and warfare typically occurred in flat, open terrain. Such battlefields--the stomping grounds of war...

IHT: Search : "WASHINGTON: William Safire The three factions controlling Iraq - long suspicious of one another - are now on the brink of open tribal warfare. Not the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds - I mean the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA. The spark setting off this U.S. bureaucratic conflagration is the former Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, a sophisticated, secular Shiite who organized resistance to the Sunni despot Saddam Hussein before it was popular. Since 1996, the CIA has hated him with a passion. In that year, American spooks egged on Iraqi officers to overthrow Saddam. Chalabi claims to have warned that the plotters had been penetrated, and when the coup failed and a hundred heads rolled, he dared to blame the CIA for bloody ineptitude. This is at the root of his detestation by Tenet Co. and the agency's subsequent rejection of most Iraqi sources of intelligence offered by Chalabi's group. Less personal is the State tribe's aversion. At Foggy Bott...

U.S. Newswire - Environmental Factors Key in Developing Children's Intelligence; New Research Shows How Parents Can Improve the Odds for Higher IQ : "WASHINGTON, Aug. 11 /U.S. Newswire/ -- A child's IQ is shaped long before he/she enters elementary school and is affected more by environmental factors than previously thought, says a new book, which offers advice to parents for improving their children's IQ Maximizing Intelligence, written by David J. Armor, an education expert and public policy professor at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, says that intelligence is influenced by a series of factors, and that parents have more impact on a child's developing intelligence than anyone -- or anything -- else. 'Parents have more impact on their child's IQ than any other persons or institutions, including schools,' Armor said. 'The impact is greatest in infancy and early childhood, much less after ages eight or nine. To maximize...

My Way - News : "Senor said the U.S. military decided to redeploy its troops around Najaf after moderate Shi'ite clerics stepped forward to try to end the fighting and prodded radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to take steps such as withdrawing his militiamen from the city. The young firebrand cleric made his commitments in a letter to Shi'ite leaders who had approached him in a bid to end the fighting in Najaf, Senor said. 'The coalition did not participate in the negotiation of the text of this letter but was kept aware of its progress,' said Senor. 'We are hopeful that Moqtada al-Sadr will live up to the commitments he made in his letter. If Moqtada al-Sadr does in fact live up to the commitments he made to the Shi'a house, we will play our part.'"

WorldNetDaily: Sustainable oil? : "Currently there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 680 billion barrels of Middle East reserve oil. Creating that much oil would take a big pile of dead dinosaurs and fermenting prehistoric plants. Could there be another source for crude oil? An intriguing theory now permeating oil company research staffs suggests that crude oil may actually be a natural inorganic product, not a stepchild of unfathomable time and organic degradation. The theory suggests there may be huge, yet-to-be-discovered reserves of oil at depths that dwarf current world estimates. The theory is simple: Crude oil forms as a natural inorganic process which occurs between the mantle and the crust, somewhere between 5 and 20 miles deep. In his 1999 book, "The Deep Hot Biosphere," Dr. Gold presents compelling evidence for inorganic oil formation. He notes that geologic structures where oil is found all correspond to "deep earth" formations, not the ...

WTOPNEWS.com Fallujah Emerging As Islamic Mini-State : "FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) - With U.S. Marines gone and central government authority virtually nonexistent, Fallujah resembles an Islamic mini-state _ anyone caught selling alcohol is flogged and paraded in the city. Men are encouraged to grow beards and barbers are warned against giving 'Western' hair cuts. 'After all the blood that was shed, and the lives that were lost, we shall only accept God's law in Fallujah,' said cleric Abdul-Qader al-Aloussi, offering a glimpse of what a future Iraq may look like as the U.S.-led occupation draws to a close. 'We must capitalize on our victory over the Americans and implement Islamic sharia laws.' The departure of the Marines under an agreement that ended the three-week siege last month has enabled hard-line Islamic leaders to assert their power in this once-restive city 30 miles west of Baghdad. Some were active in defending the city against th...

Strategic Forecasting, Inc. Improvements in Western Intelligence : "Taken together, the recent incidents indicate the United States and its allies are armed with increasingly actionable intelligence from their sources in the Middle East, Pakistan and elsewhere. Although al Qaeda might remain, in the intelligence community's words, a 'ghost' or an elusive hydra, the community's failures prior to the Sept. 11 attacks no longer can justify ongoing complacency toward its warnings about the risks of attacks. The government alerts also cannot be dismissed merely as attempts to elicit 'chatter' or otherwise improve officials' view into the threat from radical Islam. These events indicate that at least some parts of the U.S. counterterrorism community have reached a crucial milestone in their operational and analytical capabilities -- which aids their ability to predict al Qaeda's next moves and other emerging threats. It is in light of this assessm...

U.S. Warns Of Al Qaeda Threat This Summer (washingtonpost.com) : "In April, an FBI bulletin to law enforcement agencies warned of possible truck bombs. A source familiar with the government's threat discussions said yesterday that truck bombs are a primary concern. 'I'm more worried than I was at Christmastime,' said one senior U.S. intelligence official, comparing the 'election threat' to the canceling of specific airline flights around the holidays. He said the U.S. government is convinced there are as yet unidentified al Qaeda operatives residing in the United States, waiting for the word to launch plots. 'They are here, and there are indications they are preparing' attacks, said the official, whom government policy bars from being named. Another FBI bulletin, issued last week, urged law enforcement officials to be on the alert for possible suicide bombers. Officials were urged to take note of people dressed in bulky jackets in wa...

News Afghanistan, the war the world forgot : "Three years after the overthrow of the Taliban and George Bush's declaration of victory in the first conflict in the war on terror, Afghanistan is a nation on the edge of anarchy. A devastating indictment of the Allies' failure to help reconstruct the country in the wake of the 2001 conflict is to be delivered in a parliamentary report. The Independent has learnt that an all-party group of MPs from the Foreign Affairs Committee has returned from a visit to the country shocked and alarmed by what they witnessed. They warn that urgent action must be taken to save Afghanistan from plunging further into chaos because of Western neglect. As President Bush and Tony Blair unveil their plans today for the future of Iraq through the draft of a new United Nations resolution, the MPs warn that the mistakes of Afghanistan could be repeated with similar tragic consequences in Iraq."

News UN troops buy sex from teenage refugees in Congo camp : "Teenage rape victims fleeing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo are being sexually exploited by the United Nations peace-keeping troops sent to the stop their suffering. The Independent has found that mothers as young as 13 - the victims of multiple rape by militiamen - can only secure enough food to survive in the sprawling refugee camp by routinely sleeping with UN peace-keepers. Testimony from girls and aid workers in the Internally Displaced People (IDP) camp in Bunia, in the north-east corner of Congo, claims that every night teenage girls crawl through a wire fence to an adjoining UN compound to sell their bodies to Moroccan and Uruguayan soldiers. The trade, which according to one victim results in a banana or a cake to feed to her infant son, is taking place despite a pledge by the UN to adopt a 'zero tolerance' attitude to cases of sexual misconduct by those representing the organisatio...

Don't give Iraqis self-rule all at once : "Here's a story no American news organization thought worth covering last week, so you'll just have to take it from me. In the southern Iraqi town of Amara, 20 men from Scotland's Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders came under attack from 100 or so of Muqtada al-Sadr's ''insurgents.'' So they fixed bayonets and charged. It was the first British bayonet charge since the Falklands War 20 years ago. And at the end of it some 35 of the enemy were dead in return for three minor wounds on the Argylls' side. If you're used to smart bombs, unmanned drones and doing it all by computer back at HQ, you're probably wondering why a modern Western army is still running around with bayonets at the end of their rifles. The answer is that it's a very basic form of psychological warfare.From Baghdad press conferences to Colin Powell, too much of the tone is half-hearted and implicitly apologetic: On ba...

The uneasy loyalties of a Muslim soldier Mirza Mahmood Ahmad of Great Falls, Va., recalls his uneasy feelings about his son’s deployment to Iraq in January, though he is proud of the young man’s service in the Virginia National Guard. “I said, ‘Bashir, you want to go? There is no confusion in your mind? You are a Muslim. You may have to fight against other Muslims.’ ” His son was annoyed by the question, Mr. Ahmad says. “He said, ‘First of all, I’m a medic. I won’t be fighting. Second,’ he said, ‘I can’t back out’ — because of his loyalty to his fellow soldiers,” says Mr. Ahmad, 47, a Pakistani-born U.S. citizen who owns his own international wireless company. ... Mr. Ahmad says he must defend his son’s presence in Iraq to some at his mosque who question how a Muslim can go to an Islamic country and fight against members of his own religion. “I have had to explain why Bashir is doing this,” he says. “He’s an extremely smart kid. People like Bas...

Jihad’s Unlikely Alliance MADRID — The odd crew of longtime extremists and radicalized gangsters accused of carrying out the March train bombings here nourished their holy war with holy water. And hashish. The water came from Mecca, the Muslim holy city in Saudi Arabia. The conspirators drank it during purification rituals at a barbershop that was an after-hours prayer hall for adherents of Takfir wal Hijra, a secretive Islamic sect allegedly active in the criminal underworld of Europe and North Africa. The hashish came from Morocco, European investigators believe. The ideologues of the terrorist cell justified selling drugs as a weapon of jihad. The Moroccan dealer who financed the plot traded a load of hashish for the dynamite that slaughtered 191 people aboard commuter trains on March 11. The drug trafficker led the cell along with a Tunisian economics student, a duo whose disparity reflects the evolving nature of Islamic terrorism. Both blew themselves u...

Yahoo! News - Qaeda Has 18,000 Militants for Raids - Think Tank : "LONDON (Reuters) - Al Qaeda has more than 18,000 militants ready to strike and the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq (news - web sites) has accelerated recruitment to the ranks of Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s network, a leading London think-tank said on Tuesday. Al Qaeda's finances were in good order, its 'middle managers' provided expertise to Islamic militants around the globe and bin Laden's drawing power was as strong as ever, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said. It warned in its annual Strategic Survey that al Qaeda would keep trying to develop plans for attacks in North America and Europe and that the network ideally wanted to use weapons of mass destruction. 'Meanwhile, soft targets encompassing Americans, Europeans and Israelis, and aiding the insurgency in Iraq, will do,' the institute said. 'Galvanized by Iraq if compromised by Afg...

US intelligence fears Iran duped hawks into Iraq war An urgent investigation has been launched in Washington into whether Iran played a role in manipulating the US into the Iraq war by passing on bogus intelligence through Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, it emerged yesterday. Some intelligence officials now believe that Iran used the hawks in the Pentagon and the White House to get rid of a hostile neighbour, and pave the way for a Shia-ruled Iraq. According to a US intelligence official, the CIA has hard evidence that Mr Chalabi and his intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib, passed US secrets to Tehran, and that Mr Habib has been a paid Iranian agent for several years, involved in passing intelligence in both directions. The CIA has asked the FBI to investigate Mr Chalabi's contacts in the Pentagon to discover how the INC acquired sensitive information that ended up in Iranian hands. The implications are far-reaching. Mr Chalabi and Mr Habib were the ch...

The Biloxi Sun Herald BAGHDAD, Iraq - I am a soldier with the 16th Engineering Battalion of the 1st Armored Division. Our unit is presently in combat against the uprising of Muqtada al-Sadr...... Our leaders acted with caution and care to secure ever-stronger cards against Sadr while working to achieve four main goals. The first goal was to isolate Sadr. Second was to exile him from his power base in Baghdad. Third was to contain his uprising. And the last was to get his hard-line supporters to abandon him and to encourage moderates to break from him. This has been done brilliantly. Sadr is losing everything. Consider just some of the goals we've accomplished recently: • Goal One: Sadr's so-called Mahdi Army militia now is fighting alone. The people of Baghdad, Karbala and Najaf are not supporting him. His forces are isolated. • Goal Two: His one-time powerbase, Sadr City in Baghdad, has been lost. Sadr has been exiled. We have him on the run. Other Shia leaders ...

Telegraph | News | Billion-dollar timebomb puts Chalabi at risk Ahmad Chalabi is in possession of 'miles' of documents with the potential to expose politicians, corporations and the United Nations as having connived in a system of kickbacks and false pricing worth billions of pounds. That may have been enough to provoke yesterday's American raid. So explosive are the contents of the files that their publication would cause serious problems for US allies and friendly states around the globe. Late last year and several months before Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority became involved, Mr Chalabi had amassed enough information concerning corruption in the oil-for-food scandal to realise that he was sitting on explosive material. It was information that would lead to the publication in a Baghdad newspaper in January of a list of 270 businessmen, politicians and corporations, of whom many were alleged to have received money in the form of kickbacks ...

New York Post Online Edition: postopinion KILL FASTER! That propaganda is increasingly, viciously, mindlessly anti-American. When our forces engage in tactical combat, dishonest media reporting immediately creates drag on the chain of command all the way up to the president. Real atrocities aren't required. Everything American soldiers do is portrayed as an atrocity. World opinion is outraged, no matter how judiciously we fight. With each passing day — sometimes with each hour — the pressure builds on our government to halt combat operations, to offer the enemy a pause, to negotiate . . . in essence, to give up. We saw it in Fallujah, where slow-paced tactical success led only to cease-fires that comforted the enemy and gave the global media time to pound us even harder. Those cease-fires were worrisomely reminiscent of the bombing halts during the Vietnam War — except that everything happens faster now. Even in Operation Desert Storm, the effect of images trumped ...

WorldTribune.com U.S. military sources said senior commanders have been concerned over the failure or refusal by several militaries in the coalition to fight Shi'ite insurgents in central and southern Iraq. The sources said these non-U.S. coalition forces have demonstrated an unwillingness to sustain casualties in battles with the Iranian-backed Mahdi Army. "The message relayed to some of these forces – by both commanders and political leaders – is that there's no sense in getting hurt or killed in Iraq," a U.S. military source said. On May 16, Italian troops withdrew from their base in the southern city of Nasseriya after the outpost was attacked by Mahdi Army combatants, Middle East Newsline reported. An Italian soldier was killed and 16 others were injured before the Italian commander ordered his troops to evacuate Nasseriya and redeploy in an air force base in Talil about 10 kilometers away. The U.S. sources said the Italian force demonstrated little...

Press can't let abuse story go - The Washington Times: Nation/Politics - May 21, 2004 : "Press can't let abuse story go By Jennifer Harper THE WASHINGTON TIMES Accounts and graphic photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse persist in the press despite the fact that the story has run its course. The world already knows salient details of the prisoner humiliation and nudity, the causes of the abuse are under official investigation, and the courts-martial have begun. Yet, the caterwaul in the press against the American military and the war in Iraq continue. 'U.S. faces growing fear of failure,' noted one recent Washington Post headline..... Positive human-interest accounts about the armed forces are rare. The press tends to ignore battlefield vignettes from military news services, which could offer an expanded perspective to the public. For example, 30 U.S. airmen and soldiers delivered school supplies and toys — gifts from American children — to an Iraqi v...

CBS News | America's 'Best Friend' A Spy? | May 21, 2004 07:56:51 : "(CBS/AP) Senior U.S. officials have told 60 Minutes Correspondent Lesley Stahl that they have evidence Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi has been passing highly-classified U.S. intelligence to Iran. The evidence shows that Chalabi - who was once seen as the man likely to lead Iraq by White House and Pentagon officials - personally gave Iranian intelligence officers information so sensitive that if revealed it could, quote, 'get Americans killed.' The evidence is said to be 'rock solid.' Sources have told Stahl a high-level investigation is under way into who in the U.S. government gave Chalabi such sensitive information in the first place. "

My Way News : "Both the United States and Iraqis must shoulder the burden of stopping violence and shifting to democracy, he told them. 'The United States will lead, or the world will shift into neutral,' Bush said. The line drew nods of approval from his listeners. Several lawmakers said Bush reiterated his determination to stick to a June 30 transfer date. 'He talked about 'time to take the training wheels off,'' said Rep. Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio. 'The Iraqi people have been in training, and now it's time for them to take the bike and go forward.' Journalists were barred from the session. She and other lawmakers spoke afterward. Bush took no questions from the lawmakers, and Sen. George Allen, R-Va., said there was no dissent in the room. Bush was interrupted by applause 'probably dozens of times, and several standing ovations,' Allen said. Several GOP lawmakers who attended the meeting said Bush told his audience to...

Yahoo! News - Chalabi severs ties with US-led authority in Iraq : "Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi said his relations with the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority were 'non-existent' after an overnight raid against his house. 'My relationship with the CPA now is non-existent ...' he told reporters after claiming a firefight had narrowly been avoided between his guards and US-backed Iraqi police during the raid. 'I am America's best friend in Iraq; if the CPA finds it necessary to direct an armed attack against my home you can see the state of relations between the CPA and the Iraqi people.' The former Pentagon (news - web sites) favourite also called on US President George W. Bush (news - web sites) to hand over sovereignty to the Iraqi people without delay. 'My message to the CPA is let my people go, let my people be free. We are grateful to President Bush for liberating Iraq (news - web sites) but it is time for...

IHT: Search The awful news CNN had to keep to itself Iraqis' torment By Eason Jordan : "I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth. Henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us. Last December, when I told Information Minister Mohammed Said Sahhaf that we intended to send reporters to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, he warned me they would 'suffer the severest possible consequences.' CNN went ahead, and in March, Kurdish officials presented us with evide...

BBC NEWS | UK | Soldier arrested over hoax photos : "Soldier arrested over hoax photos The Daily Mirror published photos allegedly showing prisoner abuse At least one soldier has been arrested in connection with faked Iraqi torture pictures published in the Daily Mirror, the Ministry of Defence has said. The soldier is being questioned by the Special Investigations Branch. The newspaper apologised for publishing the hoax pictures on Saturday following the sacking of editor Piers Morgan. And the Sunday Telegraph said Trinity Mirror executives planned to reveal the identity of its sources for the story to the Royal Military Police (RMP). The RMP had said a truck shown in the photographs had never been in Iraq." Here's another battle in the media war.

Belmont Club News Coverage as a Weapon : "Historian John Terraine notes that unit casualty rates during the Civil War were close to those experienced by the British Army on the Somme. The 1/Newfoundland Regiment lost 84 % of its men on that fatal July 1, 1916. But the 1st Texas Regiment lost 82.3% in Antietam and the 1st Minnesota lost 82% at Gettysburg. Nor were these exceptional. 'In the course of the Civil War 115 regiments (63 Union and 52 Confederate) sustained losses of more than 50 percent in a single engagement'. Losses during World War 2 were just as brutal. ........ Defeat in that conflict came to those whose armies were driven from the field, whose cities were reduced to rubble and whose manpower resources could no longer continue the struggle.Viewed in this context, the American "defeat" in Iraq projected by the press must be understood as being something wholly different from anything that has gone before. The 800 odd US military deaths suf...

FOXNews.com - Top Stories - Tests Confirm Sarin in Iraqi Artillery Shell NEW YORK — Tests on an artillery shell that blew up in Iraq on Saturday confirm that it did contain an estimated three or four liters of the deadly nerve agent sarin (search), Defense Dept. officials told Fox News Tuesday. The artillery shell was being used as an improvised roadside bomb, the U.S. military said Monday. The 155-mm shell exploded before it could be rendered inoperable, and two U.S. soldiers were treated for minor exposure to the nerve agent. Three liters is about three-quarters of a gallon; four liters is a little more than a gallon. The soldiers displayed "classic" symptoms of sarin exposure, most notably dilated pupils and nausea, officials said. The symptoms ran their course fairly quickly, however, and as of Tuesday the two had returned to duty. The munition found was a binary chemical shell, meaning it featured two chambers, each containing separate chemical compounds. Upon impa...

My Way - News Iraq's Sistani Urges Forces to Leave Holy Cities : "NAJAF, Iraq (Reuters) - Iraq's foremost Shi'ite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, called on U.S. forces and Shi'ite militia fighters to withdraw from the holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala Tuesday. It was the most clear-cut statement on the issue from Sistani, Iraq's most influential Shi'ite authority, since militiamen loyal to radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr launched an uprising against the U.S.-led occupation in April. Sadr's followers, in sermons at mosques across southern, Shi'ite dominated Iraq, have urged Shi'ites to converge on Najaf and Kerbala to defend the cities against U.S. forces. But Sistani said in his statement it was too dangerous and Shi'ites should instead demonstrate in their hometowns against the presence of all military bodies in the cities. 'The office of Ayatollah Sistani calls on citizens in all of the cities and governorates not...

WorldTribune.com N. Korean rail explosion foiled missile shipment to Syria A North Korean missile shipment to Syria was halted when a train collision in that Asian country destroyed the missile cargo and killed about a dozen Syrian technicians. U.S. officials confirmed a report in a Japanese daily newspaper that a train explosion on April 22 killed about a dozen Syrian technicians near the Ryongchon province in North Korea. The officials said the technicians were accompanying a train car full of missile components and other equipment from a facility near the Chinese border to a North Korea port. A U.S. official said North Korean train cargo was also believed to have contained tools for the production of ballistic missiles. North Korea has sold Syria the extended-range Scud C and Scud D missiles, according to reports by Middle East Newsline. "The way it was supposed work was that the train car full of missiles and components would have arrived at the port and some would have...

FrontPage magazine.com :: The Sacred Muslim Practice of Beheading by Andrew G. Bostom Reactions to the grotesque jihadist decapitation of yet another "infidel Jew," Mr. Berg, make clear that our intelligentsia are either dangerously uninformed, or simply unwilling to come to terms with this ugly reality: such murders are consistent with sacred jihad practices, as well as Islamic attitudes towards all non-Muslim infidels, in particular, Jews, which date back to the 7th century, and the Prophet Muhammad's own example. According to Muhammad’s sacralized biography by Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad himself sanctioned the massacre of the Qurayza, a vanquished Jewish tribe. He appointed an "arbiter" who soon rendered this concise verdict: the men were to be put to death, the women and children sold into slavery, the spoils to be divided among the Muslims. Muhammad ratified this judgment stating that it was a decree of God pronounced from above the Seven Heavens. Thus some 6...

Roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent explodes in Iraq : "A roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent exploded near a U.S. military convoy, but there were no casualties, the U.S. military said Monday. 'The Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter artillery round containing sarin nerve agent had been found,' said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq. 'The round had been rigged as an IED (improvised explosive device) which was discovered by a U.S. force convoy. 'A detonation occurred before the IED could be rendered inoperable. This produced a very small dispersal of agent,' he said."

Saddam fears Iraqi torture www.smh.com.au : CIA interrogators have seized on an admission by Saddam Hussein that he fears torture at the hands of his Iraqi enemies, and are threatening him with a quick handover to the new government in a renewed effort to break his silence. They are also trying to exploit a new-found obsession of the former dictator with hygiene and careful food preparation to persuade him to begin giving information after five frustrating months of questioning. Lengthy daily interrogation sessions have been structured around an apparent attempt to prepare Saddam to be handed over to the interim government that takes power after June 30. The 67-year-old, who admitted that he feared torture soon after he was arrested last December, has been told his transfer will be delayed if he begins to co-operate with his interrogators."

WorldTribune.com Report: Syrians, 'equipment' were in N. Korea train blast Special to World Tribune.com EAST-ASIA-INTEL.COM Sunday, May 16, 2004 Syrian technicians accompanying unknown equipment were killed in the train explosion in North Korea on April 22, according to a report in a Japanese newspaper. A military specialist on Korean affairs revealed that the Syrian technicians were killed in the explosion in Ryongchon in the northwestern part of the country, according to the Sankei Shimbun. The specialist said the Syrians were accompanying "large equipment" and that the damage from the explosion was greatest in the portion of the train they occupied. The source said North Korean military personnel with protective suits responded to the scene soon after the explosion and removed material only from the Syrians' section of the train.

The New Yorker : "The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld's decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war on terror. According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld'...