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NEWS AND VIEWS
Archive 3 March - 21 April 2003
Items I find interesting or important - not directly connected with my business. Recent items are on the main NEWS AND VIEWS page, other older items are listed at the FULL NEWS ARCHIVE INDEX. Index shows date of posting on this website.
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INDEX - OTHER NEWS WEBSITES - ZNN ALTERNATIVE NEWS
Common Dreams "News and views for the progressive community" - US based.
Complementary Healthcare Information Service (CHIS-UK)
Friends Of The Earth UK (Press releases)
From The Wilderness Mike Ruppert's excellent site. What's wrong with official story on Sept. 11 2001, US plans for war in Colombia, CIA, USA politicians and the drugs trade, peak oil....No longer updates, but archives are still online. Mirror site was at http://www.copvcia.com
Globalinfo.org "Daily news service of the developing world" - news on site, also offers free news feed to your website.
Indymedia UK "network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues". Some good impartial comment, and some total pillocks.
ZNet "A community for people committed to social change". Includes articles by Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Robert Fisk and many more.
2003
21 April WOLVES AND SHEEP - HOW DID THE WAR GO?
17 April WHO IS ZALMAY KHALILZAD, U.S. SPECIAL ENVOY FOR IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN?
10 April EUROPE VERSUS THE ANGLO-AMERICAN ALLIANCE - NEW POLITICAL ALIGNMENTS AND THE "BIG GAME".
9 April EU CALLS FOR RELEASE OF ISRAELI NUCLEAR WHISTLEBLOWER
7 April WHEN DEMOCRACY FAILED: THE WARNINGS OF HISTORY
1 April MARTIAL LAW IN SERBIA
31 March WHO LIED TO WHOM? WHY DID THE U.S. ADMINISTRATION ENDORSE A FORGERY ABOUT IRAQ'S NUCLEAR PROGRAM?
31 March U.S. GOVERNMENT QUIETLY SEEKS MORE SWEEPING POWERS FOR SURVEILLANCE AND SECRECY
31 March U.S. MEDIA APPLAUD BOMBING OF IRAQI TV
28 March CIVILIAN SLAUGHTER
27 March THE INNER WORKINGS OF THE WAR-PROPAGANDA MACHINE
24 March NEW OUTBREAK OF GULF WAR SYNDROME PREDICTED AS COALITION USES DEPLETED URANIUM
14 March RUSSIAN EXPERT PREDICTS 500,000 IRAQI DEAD IN WAR DESIGNED TO TEST WEAPONS
12 March MERLIN THEATRE, SHEFFIELD - APPEAL FOR FUNDS FOR NEW BOILER
12 March 'WATER PRIVATISATION THREATENS WORLD POVERTY GOALS' - GREEN MEPs CALL FOR SUSPENSION OF WORLD TRADE TALKS
3 March WRITERS SNUB NESTLE OVER BABY MILK
3 March AFGHANISTAN - ONE YEAR ON
21 April WOLVES AND SHEEP - HOW DID THE WAR GO?
Article at From The Wilderness. As the U.S. prepares to declare "victory" in Iraq retired West Point instructor, Special Forces Master Sergeant Stan Goff analyzes the entirety of the war. From brutal massacres, to the U.S. instigation of the looting of Iraqi antiquities, to the sleazy pandering of U.S. mainstream media, to the dust of depleted uranium which will be killing for a thousand years, Goff gives us an inside analysis of a war that most of us don't know about. He also documents the abject failure of American progressives to make even the slightest bit of difference in anything about this war, or the next one.
Extracts;
"Then the looting began, and the US stood by. I saw it in Haiti. Let the chaos rein for a bit and they will beg for order, even if it comes from unwelcome quarters. Certain facilities were protected, like the Oil Ministry building. Then there was the most symbolic event of the war, in my opinion."
"Iraq is the geographic and cultural cradle of Western civilization. The US military was sent to attack this cradle of civilization, and the US military initiated the looting of the Museum of Archeology, where 7,000 years worth of priceless artifacts were kept to posterity. Eyewitnesses report that before the looting began, Americans had been keeping the streets clear with gunfire. Then they pulled up in front of the Museum and started firing into it. I saw a tank round's hole in the front on a CNN report, far too high for a looter to have made it. They murdered the two Sudanese guards in front of the administrative building, then directed the looters, through the US military's Arabic translators, to enter the building and gut it. By April 15th, the National Archives as well, where millions of pages of historical documents, some centuries old, were stored, was looted, and the precious records burned by a street mob while US military looked complacently on....."
"Corpses have now become a familiar phenomenon for a new generation of US soldiers. Many will return now with their heads filled with corpses and their bodies filled with depleted uranium. They will have their moment of intoxicating adulation in public and the corpses will sneak up on them in private. Then the DU will sneak up on them. Some people learn to live with corpses. Some learn to relish the freedom of killing and develop a taste for it. Perfect masculinity is sociopathic. A young Marine who had just killed a woman at a checkpoint said, matter of factly, "The chick was in the way." Gangster. Badass. Others, as the transitory adulation fades, will sense the barrenness of their wounded psyches backlit by the barrenness of a decaying consumer culture, and their alienation will flower into addiction, psychosis, and suicide. And then will we see THEM as pathological...."
17 April WHO IS ZALMAY KHALILZAD, U.S. SPECIAL ENVOY FOR IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN?
Extracts. Full article by Jared Israel at http://emperors-clothes.com/archive/khalilzad-facts.htm
Two years ago, Khalilzad was put in charge of the Persian Gulf, Southwest Asia "and Other Regional Issues" for the National Security Council. If learning about any one person can provide a clue as to what the U.S.- led Empire is trying to accomplish, from Iraq to Afghanistan, it is Zalmay Khalilzad - the same Zalmay Khalilzad who oversaw the mobilization, leadership, funding and coordination of, and the media support for, the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists who devastated Afghanistan and Bosnia.
Dr. Khalilzad is in charge of a large part of Asia and the Middle East for the National Security Council. He has *two* field positions: special U.S. envoy to Afghanistan *and* special U.S. envoy to the Iraqi opposition. Why those two? Afghanistan and Iraq aren't even in the same region. They are separated by 1424 miles, Baghdad to Kabul. Those miles have a name. It's Iran. Could that be a clue?Zalmay Khalilzad's experience is highly specialized. He is perhaps *the* leading practical planner and on-the-scene operative for carrying out the Brzezinski strategy. That strategy involves using Islamic fundamentalist terrorists to advance the US-led Empire. The fundamentalists do this by attacking secular movements and societies and by taking political and organizational leadership of opposition movements so that they can be used as tools of the Empire.
10 April EUROPE VERSUS THE ANGLO-AMERICAN ALLIANCE - NEW POLITICAL ALIGNMENTS AND THE "BIG GAME".
What lies behind the diplomatic rift at the UN Security Council? Michel Chossudovsky addresses these questions in two texts at Spectrezine. There is a brief update which examines the broader significance of the rift in the UN Security Council, plus an excerpt from chapter 5 of his book, "War and Globalisation". Topics covered include defense and the military-industrial complex, control over oil and gas reserves, and money and currency systems: the clash between the euro and the dollar.
9 April EU CALLS FOR RELEASE OF ISRAELI NUCLEAR WHISTLEBLOWER
AN ISRAELI nuclear scientist jailed for 17 years for exposing Tel Aviv's unlawful nuclear weapons programme should be released, the European Commission has ruled following an intervention by Green MEP Jean Lambert. London MEP Mrs Lambert wrote to the European Commission in March to highlight the continued detention of Mordechai Vanunu.
Vanunu, who has spent more than 11 years in solitary confinement following his extra-judicial abduction by the Israeli authorities in 1986, was refused parole in February on the grounds that further revelations could still cause 'grave damage' to the Israeli government.
But EU External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten, responding to an appeal by Mrs Lambert, said: "In terms of the original purpose of [his detention] there are no longer grounds for Mr Vanunu to be kept in isolation. The Commission has followed Mr Vanunu's case particularly closely and would welcome his early release."
Mrs Lambert added: "Given that more recent disclosures about Israel's nuclear programme have prompted no official complaint and in the context of current worldwide concern about non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, Vanunu should be released immediately. I welcome the Commission's commitment to closely monitor Mr Vanunu's case and hope the Israeli Government will take heed of its concern and act accordingly."
7 April WHEN DEMOCRACY FAILED: THE WARNINGS OF HISTORYExcellent article by Thom Hartmann (on separate page on this site) on chilling parallels - e.g. terrorism as a justification for war and draconian national security legislation - between now and 70 years ago.
1 April MARTIAL LAW IN SERBIA
NATO-controlled authorities use Djindjic assassination as an excuse. Article by Nebojsa Malic at The Emperor's New Clothes.
31 March WHO LIED TO WHOM? WHY DID THE ADMINISTRATION ENDORSE A FORGERY ABOUT IRAQ'S NUCLEAR PROGRAM?
Seymour Hersh, New Yorker ?24.3.03, full article reposted at From The Wilderness.
Article deals with the forged documents - first made public by the UK government - claiming Niger had supplied Iraq with uranium which could be used to make a nuclear bomb.
"Forged documents and false accusations have been an element in U.S. and British policy toward Iraq at least since the fall of 1997, after an impasse over U.N. inspections."
31 March U.S. GOVERNMENT QUIETLY SEEKS MORE SWEEPING POWERS FOR SURVEILLANCE AND SECRECY
Charles Lewis, Feb. 12, 2003 - full article at Center for Public Integrity
"For months the staff of Attorney General John Ashcroft has been secretly planning another tectonic shift in the historic constitutional balance between security and liberty, further encroachments against the hard-earned, legally protected, right-to-know about our government in this country. Was the Bush Administration waiting for the bombs bursting in Baghdad to spring this latest, urgent, national security legislation on the American people and Congress, another drive-by mooting of our customary democratic discourse and deliberative processes? I don’t know, but it is certainly not an unfair question to ask, given recent events".
31 March U.S. MEDIA APPLAUD BOMBING OF IRAQI TV
FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) 27.3.03. Extracts. Full article here.
When Iraqi TV offices in Baghdad were hit by a U.S missile strike on March 25, the targeting of media was strongly criticized by press and human rights groups. The general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, Aidan White, suggested that "there should be a clear international investigation into whether or not this bombing violates the Geneva Conventions." White told Reuters (3/26/03), "Once again, we see military and political commanders from the democratic world targeting a television network simply because they don't like the message it gives out." The Geneva Conventions forbid the targeting of civilian installations-- whether state-owned or not-- unless they are being used for military purposes.
(EDITED)
Some U.S. journalists, however, have not shown much concern about the targeting of Iraqi journalists. Prior to the bombing, some even seemed anxious to know why the broadcast facilities hadn't been attacked yet. Fox News Channel's John Gibson wondered (3/24/03): "Should we take Iraqi TV off the air? Should we put one down the stove pipe there?" Fox's Bill O'Reilly (3/24/03) agreed: "I think they should have taken out the television, the Iraqi television.... Why haven't they taken out the Iraqi television towers?"
(EDITED)
Given such attitudes, perhaps it's not surprising that discussions of the legality of attacking Iraqi TV have been rare in U.S. mainstream media. Yet when the White House accused Iraq of violating the Geneva Conventions by airing footage of American POWs, media were eager to engage the subject of international law. It's a shame U.S. media haven't held the U.S. government to the same standards
28 March CIVILIAN SLAUGHTER
Robert Fisk, The Independent, 27 March 2003. Extract. Full article here. LINK NOT WORKING 02.03.08, UNABLE TO LOCATE ARTICLE ELSEWHERE.It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering car.
Two missiles from an American jet killed them all – by my estimate, more than 20 Iraqi civilians, torn to pieces before they could be 'liberated' by the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask myself, to call this 'collateral damage'? Abu Taleb Street was packed with pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached through the dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red and yellow dust and rain yesterday morning.
It's a dirt-poor neighbourhood, of mostly Shia Muslims, the same people whom Messrs Bush and Blair still fondly hope will rise up against President Saddam Hussein, a place of oil-sodden car-repair shops, overcrowded apartments and cheap cafés. Everyone I spoke to heard the plane. One man, so shocked by the headless corpses he had just seen, could say only two words. "Roar, flash," he kept saying and then closed his eyes so tight that the muscles rippled between them.
How should one record so terrible an event? Perhaps a medical report would be more appropriate. But the final death toll is expected to be near to 30 and Iraqis are now witnessing these awful things each day; so there is no reason why the truth, all the truth, of what they see should not be told.
For another question occurred to me as I walked through this place of massacre yesterday. If this is what we are seeing in Baghdad, what is happening in Basra and Nasiriyah and Kerbala? How many civilians are dying there too, anonymously, indeed unrecorded, because there are no reporters to be witness to their suffering?
(EDITED)Of course, the pilot who killed the innocent yesterday could not see his victims. Pilots fire through computer-aligned co-ordinates, and the sandstorm would have hidden the street from his vision. But when one of Malek Hammoud's friends asked me how the Americans could so blithely kill those they claimed to want to liberate, he didn't want to learn about the science of avionics or weapons delivery systems.
And why should he? For this is happening almost every day in Baghdad. Three days ago, an entire family of nine was wiped out in their home near the centre of the city. A busload of civilian passengers were reportedly killed on a road south of Baghdad two days ago. Only yesterday were Iraqis learning the identity of five civilian passengers slaughtered on a Syrian bus that was attacked by American aircraft close to the Iraqi border at the weekend.
(EDITED)
We may put on the hairshirt of morality in explaining why these people should die. They died because of 11 September, we may say, because of President Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction", because of human rights abuses, because of our desperate desire to "liberate" them all. Let us not confuse the issue with oil. Either way, I'll bet we are told President Saddam is ultimately responsible for their deaths. We shan't mention the pilot, of course.27 March THE INNER WORKINGS OF THE WAR-PROPAGANDA MACHINE by John R. McArthur, publisher of Harper's magazine and author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War. Extracts - full article here, entitled "An Orwellian Pitch".
Comparing the advertising techniques of 1990-91 and 2002-3, I can't point to anything as dramatic as the White House/Kuwaiti/Hill & Knowlton fabrication of the great baby-incubator atrocity, allegedly committed by Iraqi soldiers in Kuwaiti hospitals. But I can cite numerous fraudulent assertions - aluminum tubes, in particular.
In 1990, Bush the First - with brilliant support from a Kuwaiti "witness" named Nayirah - harnessed the fake baby-killing atrocity to help drive a reluctant Senate and public into rescuing the Kuwaiti royal family (and, as Bush the First's U.S. trade representative, Carla Hills, told me, "to guarantee the right to import oil"). The "liberation" of a tiny emirate that had never known liberty remains one of the great propaganda coups of recent times, and its lessons were not lost on Bush the Second.
Twelve years ago the case for war was easier to make - Saddam had, in fact, invaded Kuwait. More recently, George W. Bush possessed no such advantage. Except for the far-fetched (now refuted) connection between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and the Iraqi government, George W.'s team began its race for congressional war authorization from a standing start. But beginning on September 7, they accelerated quickly, launching their campaign with a near total fabrication that was nothing more than a calculated scare story.
It was then that the president and British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had issued a "new" report describing a revived nuclear-weapons project in Iraq, built on the foundations of the old. Inarticulate to a fault, Bush backtracked a bit from "new" and stated that "when inspectors first went into Iraq and were . . . finally denied access, a report came out of . . . the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need."
Effective propaganda relies on half-truths and the conflation of disparate "facts" (like Saddam's genuine human-rights violations), so the notion of new IAEA evidence at least sounded plausible. Saddam almost certainly harbored ambitions to build an A-bomb - it was this that caused Israel to bomb Iraq's first and only nuclear reactor in 1981 (a pre-emptive act of war that drew unanimous condemnation from the U.N. Security Council). The trouble was that no such "new" report existed. Nor had there ever been an IAEA report containing the "six months away" assertion - not in 1991 after the war; not in December 1998 when the U.S. weapons inspectors pulled out of Iraq; not in September 2001.
More than three weeks elapsed before The Washington Times (not the "liberal" media) took the trouble to straighten out the story, but by then the administration was well on its way to panicking the Congress into authorizing war. The day after the Bush-Blair confidence trick, the newspapers and talk shows were flooded....with an administration leak about Iraq's attempt to buy special aluminum tubes, supposedly destined for its "six months away" nuclear program. Suddenly (along with the phantom IAEA report), aluminum tubes had brought the world to the brink of a nuclear Armageddon.
Not until December 8, when 60 Minutes broadcast an interview with former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright, did any expert point out publicly that the aluminum tubes were probably meant for conventional weapons. Not until January 9 did Mohammed El Baradei, head of the IAEA, essentially bury the aluminum tubes (and the Iraqi nuclear weapons program) by confirming Albright's supposition. But it was too late; Congress had long ago given Bush carte blanche to attack Iraq with its open-ended war resolution of October 11.
The media bears much of the blame; it has been so painfully slow in refuting administration double talk that Karl Rove and Andrew Card can count on a fairly long interval between propaganda declaration and contradiction; or they can bet that the contradiction will be so muted as to be insignificant. Thus could the president brazenly include the discredited aluminum tubes in his State of the Union address.
Meanwhile, stories designed to frighten the public onto a war footing proliferate. Colin Powell tells the Security Council of a "poison factory" linked to al Qaeda in northern Iraq. Reporters visit a compound of crude structures and find nothing of the kind, so an unidentified State Department official responds by saying that "a 'poison factory' is a term of art."
(EDITED - several examples in full article)
On March 7, Powell is back in the Security Council brandishing . . . aluminum tubes!:
(EDITED)
The question is, why do they get away with it?
PR practitioners say it's easy for politicians to have their way. Peter Teeley, Bush the First's press secretary when he was vice president, explained it this way: "You can say anything you want during a debate, and 80 million people hear it." If it happens to be untrue, "so what. Maybe 200 people read [the correction] or 2,000 or 20,000."
(EDITED)24 March NEW OUTBREAK OF GULF WAR SYNDROME PREDICTED AS COALITION USES DEPLETED URANIUM
Concerns for the health of UK troops in Iraq was expressed by the Green Party today. Chris Busby, Green Party Science and Technology spokesperson said "Recent calls to 'unite behind our boys' sound hollow in the ears of many veterans of the first Gulf War. Returning home with a range of illnesses including degeneration of the nervous system and various cancers, as well as less easily defined immune system failings, they were not protected by the Ministry of Defence.
"By contrast their symptoms and even their deaths were dismissed as of 'psychological origin'. Their calls to have themselves tested for the residue of the depleted uranium (DU) weapons they had been exposed to were denied and are still being blocked by an MoD Committee."Many have paid from their own pensions to have their blood and urine tested abroad, no longer trusting UK government laboratories."
Chris Busby, who represents the Gulf War Veterans on the MoD's Depleted Uranium Oversight Board was appalled at the thought of the further suffering that would be caused by this war. "The allies are planning to use more than five times the amount of DU they used the first time around in the Gulf. That caused illness in around half our soldiers, as well as thousands of cancers amongst civilians and horrible birth defects in Iraqi children". The contamination is likely to seriously escalate once the 'shock and awe ' campaign begins. Some of the bunker buster bombs contain as much as 7 tons of DU. Overall it has been calculated on the basis of 30% hard target breakdown fraction that the total DU or Uranium used will be 1900 tonnes.
"The only course for those who genuinely support our soldiers is to have them immediately withdrawn from the battlefield so that they are not exposed to these deadly poisons." Dr. Busby added "In the longer term we must all press for the abandonment of DU weapons, which are a form of indirect chemical and nuclear warfare and certainly represent a weapon of mass destruction".
A motion that Dr Busby submitted to the Committee to introduce a range of warnings before, and treatment after the war for the effects of the DU bombing was voted down in the MoD Depleted Uranium Oversight Board on 11th March.
14 March 2003 RUSSIAN EXPERT PREDICTS 500,000 IRAQI DEAD IN WAR DESIGNED TO TEST WEAPONSPaul's note 10.10.03 - that was a bit wrong, then, wasn't it! But weapons were till tested....
Rossiyskaya Gazeta in Russian, 22 Feb 2003. www.globalresearch.ca 3 March 2003. The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/SLI303A.html
Interview with military analyst Vladimir Slipchenko by Aleksandr Khokhlov; Vladimir Slipchenko is military analyst, doctor of military sciences, professor, and major general of reserves, and a major Russian specialist on future wars. His predictions of the course of US military operations in Iraq (1991, 1996, and 1998), Yugoslavia (1999), and Afghanistan (2001) coincided almost 100% with what subsequently happened in reality.[Khokhlov] Vladimir Ivanovich, so much has already been said about the reasons and causes of the new war in Iraq, but I cannot get rid of the feeling that they are. ..... not telling the full story...
[Slipchenko] The main purpose of the war is indeed being left out of the picture and nobody is saying anything about it. I see the main purpose of the war as being the large-scale real-life testing by the United States of sophisticated models of precision weapons.....
For more than 10 years now the United States has conducted exclusively no-contact wars. In May 2001 George Bush Jr., delivering his first presidential speech to students at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, spoke of the need for accelerated preparation of the US Armed Forces for future wars. He emphasized that they should be high-tech Armed Forces capable of conducting hostilities throughout the world by the no-contact method. This task is now being carried out very consistently.
It should be observed that the Pentagon buys from the military-industrial complex only those weapons that have been tested in conditions of real warfare and received a certificate of quality on the battlefield. After a series of live experiments -- the wars in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan -- many corporations in the US military-industrial complex have been granted the right to sell their precision weapons to the Pentagon. They include Martin Lockheed, General Electric, and Loral. But many other well-known companies are as yet without orders from the military department. The bottom line is $50-60 billion a year. Who would want to miss out on that kind of money? But the present suppliers of precision weapons to the Pentagon are also constantly developing new types of arms and they must also be tested The US military-industrial complex demands testbed wars from its country's political leadership. And it gets them. And that is the main aim of the new war in Iraq.
Peculiarities of the War
[Khokhlov] How will this war differ from the no-contact wars previously waged by the United States?
[Slipchenko] First, in terms of its political objectives. For the first time since 1991 the United States sets the goal of changing the political system in the enemy state and removing or physically eliminating the country's leadership.
They have not previously succeeded in this. Remember, the Americans did not previously try to remove Saddam Husayn from politics, and even Milosevic was not removed from the post of Yugoslav leader by military means. The US Armed Forces carried out their required tests of new weapons and then packed up their guns and went home. Now they face a very difficult mission.
Therefore, second, because of the change of objective the strategy of the war also changes radically For the first time the war aims mean that the United States must without fail achieve total victory. To that end it is necessary to achieve three objectives: rout the enemy's Armed Forces, destroy his economy, and change the political system.
The Iraqi army will be subjected to very powerful blows. It will be physically annihilated. In order to impose a new puppet government in the country (and I am sure the Americans have already formed that government) and to give that government the opportunity to get on with its work, the United States will be forced actually to occupy Iraq. The occupation of territory within which seats of organized resistance could persist would lead to large losses among US Army personnel. Guerrillas, and in the context of the Arab world also shahid martyrs wearing explosive belts -- naturally the Americans do not need this Therefore they will totally annihilate the Iraqi army. Practically all Iraq servicemen will die. There will be terrible carnage.
[Khokhlov] Does Iraq have any chance of offering resistance to the United States?
[Slipchenko] In Iraq we will once again see a situation where two generations of warfare meet. Iraq is strong and prepared for a war of the last generation -- on land and for land, for every target. But 600,000 soldiers, 220 military aircraft, something like 2,200 tanks, 1,900 artillery guns, around 500 multiple rocket launchers, 6 SCUD missile launchers, 110 surface-to-air missile systems, and 700 anti-aircraft installations will prove useless when they meet the aggressor.
In fact, there will not be a meeting on the battlefield as such. The Americans, waging a no-contact war, will methodically use precision missile strikes to destroy all the key facilities of Iraq's state and military infrastructure, and will then wipe out enemy manpower with missile and bombing raids.
Progress of the War
[Khokhlov] How will the Americans begin hostilities?
[Slipchenko] First of all there will be precision strikes against bunkers and command posts where Saddam Husayn and the Iraqi leaders might be hiding, against Army headquarters and troop positions, and against components of the air defense system. Sophisticated ground-penetrating vacuum-type precision munitions will be used to destroy buried targets. Even if one of these weapons explodes not exactly inside, say, an underground bunker, in any case the exits from the shelter will be blocked. The bunker will become a mass grave for everyone who is unfortunate enough to be in it.
To destroy armored equipment, in the very first days the Americans will use cluster aviation bombs with self-guided munitions. The "mother"-cluster bomb gives "birth" to several tens or hundreds of "baby" bombs, each of which independently chooses its own target to destroy on the ground.
I am confident that in the very first hours of the war the United States will also use new pulse bombs They are also called microwave bombs. The principle by which these weapons operate is as follows: an instantaneous discharge of electromagnetic radiation on the order of two megawatts. At a distance of 2-2.5 kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion the "microwaves" instantly put out of action all radioelectronic systems, communications and radar systems, all computers, radio receivers, and even hearing aids and heart pacemakers. All these things are destroyed by the meltdown method. Just imagine, a person's heart explodes!...
As a result of the use of these weapons Iraqi systems for command and control of the state and troops will be destroyed practically instantaneously.
[Khokhlov] What other new types of arms could be tested?
[Slipchenko] Since this war will be experimental for the United States, several new types of precision cruise missiles will be tested with a view to obtaining quality certificates. I believe attention will be devoted first and foremost to missile launches from submarines. The Americans are planning to make their submarine fleet the main launchpad.
The Pentagon will continue to perfect the mechanism for targeting precision weapons. In 2000 with the help of the space shuttle Endeavor the United States scanned around 80% of the surface of the Earth and created an electronic map of the planet in three-dimensional coordinates. The level of detail of objects on this map is down to the size of a window. That is to say, you could train a lens -- installed in a military satellite -- first on Baghdad, then on the city center, then on Saddam's palace, and on his bedroom window. You give the command -- and in a few minutes' time a targeted cruise missile flies into that window...
[Khokhlov] How long will this war go on?
[Slipchenko] I predict that Operation Shock And Awe will last not more than six weeks. The first period of the war -- the "shock" -- will last around 30 days. Some 400-500 sea- and air-based precision cruise missiles will be launched against targets in Iraq every 24 hours. During that month Iraq's troops and its economic potential will be annihilated. Anything that survives for any reason will be guaranteed destruction in the next two weeks. In the second stage -- "awe" -- the Americans will conduct a piloted version of a total cleanup of the territory. To this end the United States will use B-52 and B-2 Stealth bombers. In four hours of flight one Stealth is capable of detecting and destroying as many as 200 stationary or moving targets on the ground. The United States intends to use at least 16 B-2 bombers The Stealths will be in the air constantly, one replacing the other.
[Khokhlov] Will the Iraqi air defense system be able to counter the American planes and cruise missiles?
[Slipchenko] Iraq already has no air defense facilities in the north and south of the country -- US aviation is constantly bombing these areas. What remains in the center of the country will be destroyed in the first 10 minutes of the war. Iraq's anti-aircraft system is based on the classical active radar detection system: emit -- detect -- illuminate -- destroy. The Americans will exploit this for their own purposes. As soon as an Iraqi radar reveals itself by emitting electromagnetic energy, a precision cruise missile will be dispatched against the "revealed" air defense facility using this same beam. Iraq has no chance of countering this.
[Khokhlov] How much will this war cost?
[Slipchenko] According to my estimates, $80 billion. But the total sum spent could rise to 100 billion. We will never know the exact figure of expenditure, if only because the war will be partly funded by private companies offering the Pentagon their experimental models of precision weapons for free in the hope of future dividends. The program for rearming the US Armed Forces is about $600 billion Therefore today the military-industrial complex need not stint, it can give weapons to the Army for free.
[Khokhlov] What human losses could Iraq suffer?
[Slipchenko] Very considerable ones. Since the Americans are planning to physically annihilate the Iraqi army, I reckon that at least 500,000 people will be killed. This will be a very bloody war.
After the Apocalypse
[Khokhlov] What will come after the war?
[Slipchenko] The Americans will have to occupy Iraq. The occupation corps will apparently consist of four mechanized and armored divisions, one parachute division, and one division of the British Armed Forces. All these troops will not fight. There will be no ground operations in Iraq! The US Army will enter a burning desert -- the Iraqis will certainly set fire to the oilfields -- without a single shot being fired. There will simply be nobody to shoot at them.
[Khokhlov] How long will the direct occupation last? Will the Americans stay in Iraq forever?
[Slipchenko] They will certainly leave Iraq. There is no point in their staying there. The occupation will last one and a half, two, or at the most three years and will cost American taxpayers a further $80-100 billion to maintain the troops in Iraq. Then the United States may enlist in an operation that they will undoubtedly call "peacekeeping" the Poles, Czechs, and other "new recruits" to NATO, the Estonians, but they themselves will leave. The "peacekeepers" will stay a further one to one and a half years in Iraq.
During this time major investments will be made in the country with a regime friendly to the United States, and in two years' time Iraq's oil sector will reach a level of oil extraction of 2-2.4 million barrels a day. In five years they will be extracting up to 5 million barrels of oil a day. The world oil price will fall to $12-15 a barrel. The currently stagnant US economy will soar.
[Khokhlov] And what will happen to Russia's economy, which is currently supported exclusively by "petrodollars"?
[Slipchenko] I have no answer to that question. I am an expert in wars.12 March 2003 MERLIN THEATRE, SHEFFIELD - APPEAL FOR FUNDS FOR NEW BOILER
After a long life of 34 years, the theatre boiler has finally expired. A new one has cost over £12,000, which will bite deeply into our reserves.
CAN YOU HELP? Any amount will be appreciated. If you are a tax payer you can sign an exemption form, which means we receive 22% more of your gift. Please ask for a form and we will send you one.
We are sending this appeal to all our friends, and past and present users of the theatre. As the new boiler is more than twice efficient than the old one, this means the theatre will be a much warmer place.
Thanking you in anticipation,
Yours sincerely,
Robert Chamberlain
DirectorMerlin Theatre, 2 Meadow Bank Road Sheffield, S11 9AH. 0114 2551638.
12 March 2003 'WATER PRIVATISATION THREATENS WORLD POVERTY GOALS' - GREEN MEPs CALL FOR SUSPENSION OF WORLD TRADE TALKS
GREEN MEP Caroline Lucas today called for an immediate suspension of World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks after the European Parliament was warned water privatisation could undermine the UN 'Millennium Goal' of halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water.
Dr Lucas, Green MEP for South-East England and vice-president of the European Parliament's International Trade Committee, said discussions on further liberalisation of trade in services were being held behind closed doors and beyond either public or parliamentary scrutiny.
"The GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) talks are being held in secret. Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy has allowed select MEPs to view relevant documents, but only after they have agreed to a gagging clause preventing them from disclosing or discussing their contents, even with other MEPs," she said.
"Under GATS national and local governments would be prohibited from introducing any social or environmental regulations which could be interpreted as a barrier to international trade. Handing over democratic control of our society and environment to unelected free-marketeers without reference to elected politicians, let alone electors themselves, subverts the very idea of democracy. It is therefore time to suspend negotiations at the WTO until such time as the debate can be held in public."
The impact of GATS will be felt even harder in the developing world, the European Parliament heard. Water supply may soon be opened to full international competition, with any public monopoly facing prosecution by the WTO, despite water privatisation in the developing world having brought increased prices, high disconnection rates and a shift in water provision from those who need it most to those who can afford to pay.
Dr Lucas added: "The Millennium Goal to halve the number of people lacking access to safe drinking water and proper sanitation will certainly not be achieved by selling off water services to the highest bidder."3 March 2003 WRITERS SNUB NESTLE OVER BABY MILK
Source; SchNEWS: http://www.schnews.org.uk/
Nestlé, the company who tell mums in the third world that powered milk formula is better for kids than breast milk, have scrapped plans to sponsor a new teenage book prize after seven leading writers said that they "do not wish to be associated" with Nestlés prize "in any way". Info on the worlds longest consumer boycott - Baby Milk Action, 01223
464420, www.babymilkaction.org3 March 2003 AFGHANISTAN - ONE YEAR ON
Paul's note - not mentioned here is the great upsurge in the growing of opium poppies for heroin production since the fall of the Taliban.
Source; SchNEWS: http://www.schnews.org.uk/
AFGHANI-SHAM
In the week that George W. presents his 'vision' for a post-war Iraq, a vision that he has already refused to contribute to financially, SchNEWS reckons it's appropriate to look at Afghanistan one year on. Just how has bombing and killing civilians improved the situation for the Afghan people?
The Wanted posters that litter the country, dropped by US planes, give us a clue. America's most wanted are Osama bin Laden, former Taliban leader Mullah Omar, and former Prime Minister and hardline Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Little change there then.
Hekmatyar continues to rally support among the Pashtun communities, probably due to the oversight that neglected to allow them proper representation in the Transitional Government headed up by US puppet Hamid Karzai. Karzai's credibility plummets as he turns to the US for his own security, and his power has yet to extend beyond Kabul. Someone obviously forgot to read the bit in Security Council Resolution 1378 stating that both the transitional and the pursuant democratic governments should be 'broad-based, multi-ethnic, and fully representative of all Afghan people.' With their usual 'go for the symptom if you can't get the cause' way of looking at things, the US have been bombing the Pashtun communities in the South and East of the country. If the man's too slippery, go for the people who may, just possibly, one day in the future, support him. In January, US, Norwegian and Danish fighter planes conducted a massive bombing raid close to Spin Boldak, a refugee village near the Pakistan border that houses
65,000 men, women and children, reportedly killing hundreds of civilians.
Accurate numbers were not available as the area was sealed off by troops and access denied even to the Red Cross. This is in direct contravention of UN Resolution 1379 - which underlines the importance of 'full, safe and unhindered access of humanitarian personnel and goods, and the delivery of humanitarian assistance to all children affected by armed conflict.' Earlier this month, 17 civilians, mostly women and children were killed in bombing raids designed to wipe out a handful of rebel fighters in the Baghran district to the South.
ORE OF BABYLON
US forces continue to use outlawed weapons in these attacks, such as uranium bombs and the innocuously named Daisy Cutter, a bomb the size of a VW beetle which incinerates everything within a 600 metre radius and whose shock waves can be felt miles away. Findings by the Uranium Medical Research Centre (UMRC) point out that uranium poisoning is already causing severe health problems throughout Afghanistan "The UMRC field team was shocked by the breadth of public health impacts coincident with the bombing. Without exception, at every bombsite investigated, people are ill." Yet again the US shows its middle finger to resolution number 1379 that calls upon all parties to respect conditions of 'Prohibition or Restriction' on the use of weapons which have 'Indiscriminate Effects.' And to add insult to mass destruction, George W. 'forgot' to include any humanitarian and reconstruction funds in his 2003 budget. Yet another unfortunate oversight hurriedly rescued by Congress who managed to rustle up $300 million for the cause. How many times did Bush pledge not to walk away from the Afghan people? $300million might seem like a lot, but it constitutes a small proportion of the $4billion total pledged at the Tokyo donor's conference to help rebuild Afghanistan.
Compared to the $3 billion that Israel receives in US foreign aid every year, $300m figure suddenly loses its impact. Israel has been given $240 billion since 1973, much of it used for the purchase and manufacture of weapons, plus additional funds, not counted as foreign aid, for special projects such as $180 million for the development and manufacture of the Arrow missile project. Weapons now make up 50% of Israel's manufactured exports. Contrary to the norm, Israel is not required to use this injection of funds to buy American goods, in fact American defence contractors are often forced to buy Israeli goods, and it has the power to block the sale of US military equipment to Middle Eastern countries. In common with other states that have earned the "rogue nation" label, Israel has the capacity to manufacture nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and maintains a stockpile of nuclear weapons, yet has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty and refuses to allow any independent inspection of its facilities. Israel is now demanding an additional $3-4 billion for the next 3 to 5 years to help them cope with the continuing Palestinian uprising and the consequences of a US war in Iraq.More info: Uranium contamination - www.URMC.net;
Daisy cutters - www.robearly.com/911/DaisyCutter.html
Israeli foreign aid - www.csmonitor.comPage updated 24.05.08
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