Four Marines to Face Lesser Charges After Two-Year Inquiry Into Iraqi Killings

Washington Post, January 4, 2008

By Josh White, Washington Post Staff Writer

After a two-year investigation into the killings of up to 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq, the Marine Corps has decided that none of the Marines involved in the incident will be charged with murder. Instead, two enlisted Marines and two Marine officers will face trial in coming months for the killings and for failing to investigate them.

The most serious charges have been leveled against Marine Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, who is scheduled to be arraigned on charges of voluntary manslaughter in California next week, the last step before the case officially moves to trial.

Initially called a massacre by Iraqi residents of Haditha and later characterized as coldblooded murder by a U.S. congressman, the case has turned not on an alleged rampage but on a far more complex analysis of how U.S. troops fight an insurgency in the midst of a population they seek to protect.

The Marine Corps at first charged eight Marines and officers with murder or failing to investigate an apparent war crime. The charges have since been narrowed to four men in the unit, after three were cleared and a fourth was granted immunity to testify.

Wuterich is charged with nine counts of voluntary manslaughter, with the charges alleging that he had an intent to kill and that his actions inside a residential home and on a residential street in November 2005 amounted to unlawful killing “in the heat of sudden passion caused by adequate provocation.” Charging documents released this week say he killed at least nine people without properly obtaining positive identification that they were the enemy in the midst of an attack. 1st Lt. Andrew Grayson has been charged with obstructing the investigation.

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 The Independent, January 5, 2008

By Amy Tiebel, Associated Press Writer

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in an unprecedented public acknowledgement yesterday, called continued Israeli construction in West Bank settlements a breach of Israel’s obligations under a recently revived peace plan.

Olmert’s remarks, which appeared in The Jerusalem Post daily, came just days before US President George W. Bush arrives in the region to build on the momentum created at a recent Mideast peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland. They fell short of the Palestinians’ demand for a total freeze on settlement construction — but were significant because Israel has never openly admitted before that it wasn’t living up to the internationally backed “road map” peace plan.

His comments also built on his recent efforts to defuse frictions over construction in disputed territories. Construction plans announced after the Annapolis conference have antagonized the Palestinians and disrupted fledgling peace talks, renewed after seven years of still-simmering violence.

Continued .

RINF.com, January 4, 2008

In March 2003, Dick Cheney said, “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” In May 2003, George W. Bush said, “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” In November 2004, Lt. General John Sattler said that U.S. forces (in Fallujah) had “broken the back of the insurgency.” In May 2005, Cheney said, “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”

These yahoos have turned more corners than a monkey with a Rubik’s cube. Their quotes were not only repeated, ad infinitum, but were portrayed by the media as gospel truth. Yet, with unparalleled naïveté, there are those who constantly rail against the media for their bias in neglecting to report the “progress” being made in Iraq. Some even go so far as to allegedly troll for unbiased statistics on the Department of Defense Web site.

The justification “du jour” for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, according to Bush appeasers, is the safety and prosperity of that country. Well, it’s nice to see that fictional accounts of WMD and Saddam Hussein/Al Qaeda links have finally been abandoned. How many lies can these Bush/Cheney sycophants swallow before they choke on their own gullibility? How many more American and Iraqi lives must be sacrificed on the altar of their ignorance? —Robert Baruch

Palestinian Information Center, January 4, 2008

GAZA, (PIC)– Two Qassam Brigades fighters were killed Friday morning while confronting invading IOF troops in the northern Gaza Strip bringing the number of those killed by the IOF in the past 24 hours to 11 including 5 Qassam fighters and 5 members of the same family.

The Qassam Brigades mourned, in a statement issued on Friday, two of its fighters in Beit Hanoun. The two were killed in confrontations with IOF troops who invaded Mazra’t al-Basha to the east of Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip.

“Despite the siege and the open war against the our resistance and our thriving Brigades, despite the siege and the conspiracy against our cause and our people, the Qassam Brigades remains in the battlefield carving the rocks and fighting an asymmetrical battle to protect the holiness of this land and defend the honour of the Ummah,” the statement read.

The IOF committed a massacre on Thursday morning against the Fayyad family during an incursion to the east of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip and when the invading IOF troops shelled the house of Hamdan Fayyad killing five members of the family.

Local sources told PIC that the victims of this massacre were: Karimah Fayyad (55 years), her two sons Ahmad and Sami aged 32 and 23 respectively, her daughter, aged 22 and her nephew aged 17. Other family members were wounded in the shelling.

Two resistance fighters were also killed while confronting the invading IOF troops in Khan Younis.

On Thursday evening one Qassam fighter was killed in an Israeli air raid to the east of Shejaeyyah neighbourhood in Gaza City and three civilians including two children were wounded.

Another civilian was killed and three policemen were wounded on Thursday in an Israeli air raid on Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip

Stonewalled by the C.I.A.

New York Times, January 2, 2008

Washington

MORE than five years ago, Congress and President Bush created the 9/11 commission. The goal was to provide the American people with the fullest possible account of the “facts and circumstances relating to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001” — and to offer recommendations to prevent future attacks. Soon after its creation, the president’s chief of staff directed all executive branch agencies to cooperate with the commission.

The commission’s mandate was sweeping and it explicitly included the intelligence agencies. But the recent revelations that the C.I.A. destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot. Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation.

There could have been absolutely no doubt in the mind of anyone at the C.I.A. — or the White House — of the commission’s interest in any and all information related to Qaeda detainees involved in the 9/11 plot. Yet no one in the administration ever told the commission of the existence of videotapes of detainee interrogations.

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Two Body Blows to the Political Establishment

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

For the party establishments–Democratic and Republican–it was a bad night, as their favored candidates went down to severe defeat.

With Barrack Obama’s crushing victory over Hillary Clinton, the campaign scenario of the Democratic elite is now in the trash bin. Their calculation had been that Obama would never be able to match the Clintons’ fundraising. Wrong. Obama raised huge sums from small contributors, who can continue their support. A lot of Hillary’s big financial backers have already reached their legal limits. They thought Obama was another Howard Dean, headed for deflation as soon as the voters faced the moment of decision. Wrong again. Mrs. Clinton had the big feminist organizations in her corner and a good chunk of organized labor. They didn’t deliver, any more than the Democratic machine supervised by campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe and superpollster Mark Penn. They thought they could sink Obama with December’s slurs about drug use, Islamic heritage and color. They backfired.

Keep reading . . .

Counterpunch,

Weekend Edition, December 31, 2008

Business as Usual

By LIAQUAT ALI KHAN

The Bhutto assassination might force Pakistani rulers to reconsider supporting the war on terror that has been forced upon the entire Muslim world. Just as Spain withdrew from the war in Iraq after the Madrid terrorist bombings, Pakistan too might use Bhutto’s death to withdraw from the war in Afghanistan. For sure, Pakistan is no Spain. It will be much harder for corrupt Pakistani rulers to say no to billions of dollars coming from America. If Islamabad does not change its devious ways, however, the war on terror will consume and destroy Pakistan.

Subservience and Subversion

Since its birth in 1947, Pakistan has been a subservient but subversive ally of the United States. Lacking resources and strong political institutions, Pakistani rulers have played the role of makkar noker (cunning servant) who takes pleasure in servitude but nonetheless resents and subverts the wellbeing of the master. That duplicitous Pakistani officials can outsmart naïve American policymakers has been the defining attribute of Islamabad’s furtive foreign policy. This policy may have brought fame and fortune to some military and political individuals, but it has been a proven disaster for the people of Pakistan.

Keep reading . . .

Swissinfo.org, January 4, 2008

By Aung Hla Tun

YANGON (Reuters) – Myanmar’s junta deployed riot police and fire trucks at potential flashpoints in Yangon on Friday to prevent pro-democracy protests on the 60th anniversary of independence from Britain.

Riot police took up positions outside the former capital’s City Hall and the Shwedagon and Sule pagodas — all key locations in mass anti-junta protests that erupted in September.

One government official, who did not want to be named, said local authorities had also been ordered to prepare gangs of “Swan-Arr-Shin”, or “Masters of Force”, thugs in case pro-democracy activists tried to demonstrate.

The junta, the latest face of 45 years of army rule in the former Burma, limited its celebrations to a military ceremony in the remote new capital, Naypyidaw, and a broadcast message from junta supremo Than Shwe.

Keep reading . . .

TPM, December 31, 2007,

Boy, was it time for an update.

Late last year we decided to take stock of all the Bush Administration officials who’d been accused of corruption and/or resigned in the face of scandal. Although we had fun doing it, we altruistically started the project in order to help our friends at Powerline, who professed an inability to think of any Bush officials beset by scandal.

This year´s result, which built on Justin Rood´s original gem, is, like our catalog of the administration´s efforts to disappear information, a staggering monument to the Bush Administration. And it wouldn’t have been possible without TPM’s research hounds, Adrianne Jeffries, Andrew Berger, and Peter Sheehy.

A quick note on methodology. Since a complete catalog of administration officials who’ve been accused of some form of corruption or abuse of power would be endless, we tried to maintain a high standard for inclusion. Most of those below were the subjects of criminal probes, but we also included officials who were credibly accused of acts that, if not criminal, were a corruption of office (like the U.S. attorney scandal). And even then, such officials were only included if their accusers had them dead to rights (which is why Karl Rove didn’t make the cut). We also limited ourselves to officials who were either political appointees or whose actions were so political that they were effectively political appointees (like John Tanner).

Enjoy:

Continued . . .

Al Bawaba,  January 3, 2008

Israeli troops backed by airstrikes killed at least six Palestinians on Thursday in the Gaza Strip. Hamas officials reported heavy clashes between its men and Israeli troops east of Khan Younis and at least nine Israeli airstrikes overnight that wounded 10 people, at least three critically.

The latest fighting started after midnight when Israeli forces, including 10 tanks, raided an area east of Khan Younis, sparking exchanges of fire with Hamas and Islamic Jihad men, witnesses said, according to the AP. Two Palestinian fighters were killed and nine hurt in the airstrikes, doctors said.

Later, an Israeli tank fired a shell at a house, killing four people, including an Islamic Jihad activist, his mother and 19-year-old sister, and wounding six others, the family and doctors said. Palestinian doctors reported a total of 21 injured in the clashes.

Continued . . .