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Wednesday, June 09, 2004

War News for June 9, 2004 Bring ‘em on: Eleven Iraqis killed, two wounded in firefight near Fallujah. Bring ‘em on: Oil pipeline sabotaged near Beiji. Bring ‘em on: Oil pipeline ablaze near Kirkuk. Bring ‘em on: US convoy attacked in Baghdad. Bring ‘em on: Polish Defense Ministry says Polish, Slovakian and Latvian soldiers were killed by mortar attack. Bring ‘em on: Power plant sabotaged near Baghdad. Bring ‘em on: Two insurgents killed while planting roadside bomb near Baquba. Bring ‘em on: Insurgents mortar Iraqi security forces near Fallujah. Bring ‘em on: Roadside bomb attack against “Westerners” in Ramadi. US Marines feel the strain of Bush’s War. “Because two Marine expeditionary units, including one from Camp Pendleton, are deploying to Iraq now instead of this fall, Marine officials might have trouble supporting another force rotation next spring if that is required, Lt. Gen. Robert Magnus said.” Bush-style liberation. “Most days, the Iraqi schoolgirls say, they can hear gunfire ring out in the distance, and sometimes closer to home. When a bomb detonated in front of the Red Cross headquarters in October, the explosion was so close to Mais Sami's Tigris Middle School that the ninth-grader thought the school grounds were hit.” Incompetence. “Several sites in Iraq that once contained equipment that could have been used for biological or chemical weapons have been emptied and dismantled since May last year, according to the report to the UN Security Council. It made clear that the US-led occupation force had not protected sites or items that inspectors tagged before the war because of their potential use in weapons of mass destruction.” Kurds threaten to secede from Iraq. Al-Sadr gains popularity among Iraqis. “If elections were held today, polls and interviews on the street suggest, the virulently anti-American cleric would command a big percentage of the vote. In a recent poll of 1,640 Iraqis across the country done by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, the percentage of those who either somewhat or strongly supported Sadr was higher than the numbers for the new prime minister and a long list of other high-ranking Iraqi government officials.” Ten US soldiers were wounded in yesterday’s car bombing in Baquba. Deployed US airmen receive tour extentions. Abu Ghraib. “The head of the interrogation center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq told an Army investigator in February that he understood some of the information being collected from prisoners there had been requested by ‘White House staff,’ according to an account of his statement obtained by The Washington Post.” Commentary Editorial: “Each new revelation makes it more clear that the inhumanity at Abu Ghraib grew out of a morally dubious culture of legal expediency and a disregard for normal behavior fostered at the top of this administration. It is part of the price the nation must pay for President Bush's decision to take the extraordinary mandate to fight terrorism that he was granted by a grieving nation after 9/11 and apply it without justification to Iraq.” Editorial: “There is no justification, legal or moral, for the judgments made by Mr. Bush's political appointees at the Justice and Defense departments. Theirs is the logic of criminal regimes, of dictatorships around the world that sanction torture on grounds of ‘national security.’ For decades the U.S. government has waged diplomatic campaigns against such outlaw governments -- from the military juntas in Argentina and Chile to the current autocracies in Islamic countries such as Algeria and Uzbekistan -- that claim torture is justified when used to combat terrorism. The news that serving U.S. officials have officially endorsed principles once advanced by Augusto Pinochet brings shame on American democracy -- even if it is true, as the administration maintains, that its theories have not been put into practice. Even on paper, the administration's reasoning will provide a ready excuse for dictators, especially those allied with the Bush administration, to go on torturing and killing detainees.” Opinion: “The entire flock of war hawks, Rumsfeld and Cheney and their aides, remains in place. They are culpable in ways far more serious than The New York Times or other news organizations that were sucked into the misinformation game. It's time for the president to either accept his share of the blame or sack those who misled the American people.” Opinion: “Last January, Bush praised veterans during a visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The same day, 164,000 veterans were told the White House was ‘immediately cutting off their access to the VA health care system.’” Casualty Reports Local story: New Jersey Guardsman wounded in Iraq. Local story: New York soldier wounded in Iraq. Local story: California security contractor dies in Iraq. 86-43-04. Pass it on.

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