Today in Iraq

War News for June 22, 2004 Bring ‘em on: Three US soldiers wounded in two ambushes near Baquba. Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed, six wounded in mortar attack near Baghdad. Bring ‘em on: Five Iraqis killed in roadside bomb ambush near Mosul. Bring ‘em on: Fifty insurgents storm and demolish Iraqi police station near Iskandariyah. Bring ‘em on: Iraqi bomb disposal expert wounded near Mosul. Bring ‘em on: City council member assassinated near Tikrit. Bring ‘em on: Two local council members assassinated in Baghdad. Bring ‘em on: Iraqi university dean and spouse assassinated in Mosul. Up shit creek. The perfect image of Lieutenant AWOL's Iraq policy. Cowards. “The Bush administration's policy of barring news photographs of the flag-covered coffins of service members killed in Iraq won the backing of the Republican-controlled Senate on Monday, when lawmakers defeated a Democratic measure to instruct the Pentagon to allow pictures.” Crooks. “Auditors working for the United Nations have strongly criticised the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority for its management of the 20 billion dollar fund from oil sales, which it said is ‘open to fraudulent acts,’ the Financial Times said. KPMG International experts also ‘encountered resistance from CPA staff’ in its attempts to oversee the fund's spending, according to an interim KPMG report obtained by the financial daily.” South Korea evacuates businessmen and workers from Iraq. Charades. “The United States plans to turn over legal, but not physical, custody of Saddam Hussein and some other prisoners to the Iraqi interim government soon after it takes over on June 30, a senior official said on Tuesday.” Lieutenant AWOL the uniter, not a divider. “Thousands of Ukrainian protesters on Tuesday demanded the government bring troops home from Iraq, saying politicians had no right to spill the blood of others for their own gain. About 2,000 Communists holding red flags and 5,000 Orthodox believers, who carried icons, swarmed the central independence square in Ukraine's capital Kiev and then marched to parliament, where speaker after speaker called for the troops' return.” Commentary Opinion: “When Clinton was in office we were preoccupied with DNA stains on dresses, not bloodstains on the streets of Baghdad, Mosul or Najaf. Nothing close to 150,000 American troops were dispatched to fight a foreign war during the Clinton administration, although I suspect there will be critics this week who will find a way to hold that against him, too. At least I hope so.” Analysis: “America's make-do policy in the Iraqi endgame was outlined by a senior administration official. From his account it's clear that Bush and his advisers have been improvising for the past few months, struggling to craft an exit strategy. The grand designs that launched the war are now long gone, replaced by a process of trial and error.” Opinion: “It's not surprising that an administration already bent on war would interpret every dot, every squiggly line, as evidence that Hussein and bin Laden were in cahoots. This made sense to Bush and Cheney since, as we have found out to our dismay, they cannot distinguish between one kind of evil and another. Every possible suggestion of cooperation somehow became proof. This was particularly the case with Cheney when it came to weapons of mass destruction. He seized on the murkiest of reports to proclaim that Iraq had "reconstituted" its nuclear weapons program, which, lo these many months later, has yet to be found. So deluded were our top guys that they invaded Iraq expecting that the major problem would be how to clean up after all the victory parades.” Opinion: “Yeah, right. The reality is that Bush and company have turned the language of lying into a fine art, always leaving themselves a shred of deniability in case the truth catches up. For example, Cheney has repeatedly cited as a smoking gun an always shaky report about 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta possibly meeting with an Iraqi official in Prague only months before the attacks, telling the nation that this sole claim to direct evidence linking Iraq with 9/11 had ‘been pretty well confirmed.’” Casualty Reports Local story: California soldier killed in Iraq. Local story: Virgin Islands soldier killed in Iraq. Local story: Washington State Marine killed in Iraq. Local story: California Marine dies in Iraq. Local story: Two Vermont Guardsmen wounded in Iraq. Local story: Connecticut soldier wounded in Iraq. Local story: Hawaii soldier injured in Iraq. Local story: Minnesota soldier wounded in Iraq. 86-43-04. Pass it on.