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  1. #21
    i/e regjistruar Maska e HFTengineer
    Anëtarësuar
    24-04-2016
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    469

    Për: Gati për luftë”, NATO 300 mijë forca në përballjen me Rusinë

    Vicotria nuland apo nuderland cifute necoconsrevcative gruaje te famshit, neoconsrevatistit robert kegan
    https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/2...perpetual-war/ qe dha rrenen e iraqkut weapon of mass destcruction fdhe loboi per luifte http://mondoweiss.net/2015/11/regime-change-trauma/



    dhe zgjedhjka e cifutrve ne ukraine cuop :



    During the Bill Clinton administration, Nuland was chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott before moving on to serve as deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs.

    She served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and then as U.S. ambassador to NATO.

    Nuland became special envoy for Conventional Armed Forces in Europe and then became State Department spokesperson in summer 2011.[5]

    She was nominated to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in May 2013 and sworn in to fill that role in September 2013.[6] During her confirmation hearings, she faced "sharp questions" about a memo she had sent outlining the talking points that would be used by the Obama administration in the days shortly after the 2012 Benghazi attack.[7]

    In her role as Assistant Secretary, she has been the lead U.S. point person for the Ukrainian crisis. She was a key figure in establishing loan guarantees to Ukraine, including a $1 billion loan guarantee in 2014, and the provisions of non-lethal assistance to the Ukrainian military and border guard.[8][9] Along with Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, she is seen as a leading supporter of defensive weapons delivery to Ukraine. In 2016 Nuland urged Ukraine to start prosecuting corrupt officials: "It's time to start locking up people who have ripped off the Ukrainian population for too long and it is time to eradicate the cancer of corruption".[10]

    Leaked phone conversation[edit]
    On February 4, 2014, a recording of a phone call between Nuland and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, on January 28, 2014 was published on YouTube.[11][12] The State Department and the White House suggested that an assistant to the deputy prime minister of Russia Dmitry Rogozin was the source of the leak, which he denied.[13][14][15]

    In their phone conversation, Nuland and Pyatt discussed who should be in the government after Viktor Yanukovych's ouster and in what ways they might achieve that transition, with the name of Arseniy Yatsenyuk (whom Nuland refers to as "Yats") coming up several times. Specifically, the two spoke about which opposition leaders they would like to see in government, what pitches they would give each opposition leader in subsequent calls to achieve this, and strategies on how they would try to manage the 'personality problems' and conflicts between the different opposition leaders with ambitions to become president.[12][13] Yatsenyuk became prime minister of Ukraine on February 27, 2014.[16]

    In the recording, Nuland makes an obscene reference to the European Union.[17] After discussing Ukrainian opposition figures Nuland states that she prefers the United Nations as mediator, instead of the European Union, adding "**** the EU," and Pyatt responds, "Oh, exactly ...."[12][18]

    According to the Washington Post,

    [Nuland] was dismissively referring to slow-moving European efforts to address political paralysis and a looming fiscal crisis in Ukraine. But it was the blunt nature of her remarks, rather than U.S. diplomatic calculations, that seemed exceptional.
    Nuland also assessed the political skills of Ukrainian opposition figures with unusual candor and, along with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, debated strategy for their cause, laying bare a deep degree of U.S. involvement in affairs that Washington officially says are Ukraine’s to resolve.[19]
    Ndryshuar për herë të fundit nga HFTengineer : 27-11-2016 më 22:48

  2. #22
    i/e regjistruar Maska e HFTengineer
    Anëtarësuar
    24-04-2016
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    469

    Për: Gati për luftë”, NATO 300 mijë forca në përballjen me Rusinë

    Zgjedhjet e para ne mendje nga ajo tel;efonate:

    Nuland: “I don’t think Klitsch [Vitali Klitschko, 1st opposition leader] should go into the government. I don’t think it’s necessary, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

    Pyatt: “Yeah. Just let him stay out and do his political homework. Moving ahead we want to keep the moderate democrats together. The problem is going to be Tyahnybok [2nd opposition leader] and I’m sure that’s part of what Yanukovych is calculating on.”

    Nuland: I think Yats [Arseny Yatsenyuk, 3rd opposition leader] is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience. What he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside. I think Klitsch going in…it’s just not going to work.”

    Vidjoa ktu
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-9aD45qxbE


    Te dy klichko dhe yatsneki jane cifute
    Ndryshuar për herë të fundit nga HFTengineer : 27-11-2016 më 23:02

  3. #23
    i/e regjistruar Maska e HFTengineer
    Anëtarësuar
    24-04-2016
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    469

    Për: Gati për luftë”, NATO 300 mijë forca në përballjen me Rusinë

    Kolominski nje nga biljoneret cifut te famshem ukrinas qe oragizuan coup me neoconsrevatisten cifute victoria nuland:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ihor_Kolomoyskyi

    On 2 March 2014, amidst the 2014 pro-Russian conflict in Ukraine, acting President Oleksandr Turchynov appointed Kolomoyskyi governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.[35] Two days later, Russian President Vladimir Putin described Kolomoyskyi as a "unique crook," and said that the citizens of Dnipropetrovsk were not happy with his appointment as Governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.[10] According to Putin, Roman Abramovich has been cheated by Igor Kolomoyskyi. Putin claimed that Kolomoyskyi had reneged on a contract with Abramovich, saying “He [Kolomoyskyi] even managed to cheat our Roman Abramovich two or three years ago. Scammed him, as our intellectuals like to say. They signed some deal, Abramovich transferred several billion dollars, while this guy never delivered and pocketed the money. When I asked him [Abramovich]: “Why did you do it?” he said: “I never thought this was possible.”[36] In contrast, The Daily Beast, a US publication, wrote in mid-June 2014 that Kolomoyskyi enjoyed the local population's strong support. “I don’t care if he’s like Hitler, as long as he prevents war coming here,” says a local restaurateur.[37]

    In April 2014 Kolomoyskyi offered a bounty for the capture of Russian-backed militants and incentives for the turning in of weapons.[38] He also is believed to have spent $10 million to create the Dnipro Battalion,[37][39] and also funds the Aidar, Azov, Dnepr 1, Dnepr 2, and Donbas volunteer battalions.[40]


    http://orientalreview.org/2014/05/14...rs-of-ukraine/




    e information provided below was obtained from an insider in one of Ukraine’s law-enforcement agencies, who wished to remain anonymous for obvious reasons. It is clear that there are people even within the interim administration in Kiev who are against of what happened in Odessa on May 2 and throughout the whole country.
    Scheming
    After the loss of Crimea and the popular uprising in Mariupol, Odessa is now Ukraine’s only gateway to the sea, thus making it the most important city in the country after Kiev.
    Ten days before the tragedy a secret meeting was held in Kiev, chaired by the incumbent president Olexander Turchinov, to prepare a special operation in Odessa. Present were minister of internal affairs Arsen Avakov, the head of the Ukrainian Security Service Valentin Nalivaychenko, and the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Andriy Parubiy. Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoiskiy, the Kiev-appointed head of regional administration of the Dnepropetrovsk region, was consulted in regard to the operation.
    During that meeting Arsen Avakov has reportedly came up with the idea of using football hooligans, known as “ultras,” in the operation. Ever since his time as the head of the Kharkov regional administration he has worked closely with the fans leaders, whom he continued to sponsor even from his new home in Italy.
    Kolomoisky temporarily delivered his private “Dnieper-1” Battalion under the command of law-enforcement officials in Odessa and also authorized a cash payment of $5,000 for “each pro-Russian separatist” killed during the special operation.
    Mycola Volvov was wanted by Ukrainian police since 2012 for fraud.
    Mykola Volvov was wanted by the Ukrainian police since 2012 for fraud.
    A couple of days before the operation in Odessa Andriy Parubiy brought dozens of bullet-proof vests to local ultra-nationalists. This video shows an episode of handing the vests to the local Maidan activists in Odessa. Take note of the person who receives the load. He is Mykola Volkov, a local hard-core criminal who would be repeatedly screened during the assault on Trade Unionist House gun-shooting at the people and reporting about the “incident” by phone to an official in Kiev.
    Preparations
    Ultranationalist militants from the extremist Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA-UNSO), who could be recognized by their red armbands, were also used during the operation. They were assigned a key role in the staging of the provocations: they masqueraded as the defenders of the tent city on Kulikovo Field, and then lured its occupants to the House of Trade Unions to be slaughtered.
    Fifteen roadblocks were set up outside of Odessa, secured by militants under the personal command of Kolomoisky’s “Dnieper-1” Battalion, as well as Right Sector’s thugs from Dnepropetrovsk and the western regions of Ukraine. In addition, two military units from the Self-Defense of Maidan arrived in Odessa, under the command of the acting head of the administration of the president, Sergey Pashinsky – the same man who was caught with a sniper rifle in the trunk of his car on Feb. 18 on Independence Square (Maidan) in Kiev. Pashinsky later claimed that he had not been fully informed about the plans for the operation and had dispatched his men only to “protect the people of Odessa.”Thus, there were a total of about 1,400 fighters from other regions of Ukraine in the vicinity at the time –thus countering the idea that there were “residents of Odessa” who burned down the House of Trade Unions.
    Dmitry Fucheji mysteriously dissappeared soon after the tradegy in Odessa.
    Deputy chief of Odessa police and principle coordinator of the operation Dmitry Fucheji mysteriously dissappeared soon after the tradegy in Odessa.
    The role of the Odessa police forces in the operation was personally directed by the head of the regional police, Petr Lutsyuk, and his deputy Dmitry Fucheji. Lutsyuk was assigned the task of neutralizing Odessa’s regional governor, Vladimir Nemirovsky, to prevent him from putting together an independent strategy that could disrupt the operation. Fucheji led the militants right to Greek Square where he was allegedly “wounded” (in order to evade responsibility for subsequent events).
    The operation was originally scheduled for May 2 – the day of a soccer match, which would justify the presence of a large number of sports fans (“ultras”) downtown and would also mean there would be a minimal number of Odessa residents on the streets who were not involved in the operation, since the majority of the city’s population would be out of town enjoying their May Day holidays.
    Operation
    Train from Kharkov arrived in Odessa on May 2 at 8.00 am carrying fans of the Metallist soccer club, including some “ultras” who were taking part in the operation. In addition, militants from the “Dnieper-1” Battalion and Right Sector simultaneously entered the city in small groups. Some of the Self-Defense of Maidan militants also arrived from Kiev, most of them by cars. That day the Odessa police were under strict orders not to stop cars with license plates from Kiev, Dnipropetrovsk, and Lvov.
    112121_originalIn the afternoon, some of the fighters headed toward Sobornaya Square, where those taking part in the “March for a United Ukraine” were scheduled to gather. Their task was to organize the crowd and lead them to the barricades on Greek Square. A “special operations” group adorned with St. George ribbons donned their balaclavas and marched down Alexandrovsky Avenue. These were the “pro-Russian activists” seen in numerous photos and videos. The provocateurs wore red armbands on their sleeves in order to distinguish themselves from the real, Odessa-based activists. Likewise, the police who had insider information about the details of the operation sported red armbands as well.Unfortunately, some of the real activists, who were not privy to that information, gave in to the provocateurs’ urgings and rushed off to “stop the fascists”.
    Many eyewitnesses recorded what happened next. With the support of the police, the supposedly“pro-Russian” provocateurs lined up near the “Afina” shopping center at the intersection of Greek str. and Vice Admiral Zhukov line, where provocateurs from among the soccer fans, including those representing Right Sector and UNA-UNSO, attacked them (which was confirmed even by the pro-Maidan observers). Firearms were used by both sides and both sides suffered fatalities.

    The task of distracting the “honest” soccer fans from the game and directing the crowd toward Kulikovo Field had been fully accomplished. The provocateurs that had incited the crowd then retreated to the “Afina” shopping center, where they were later taken away by the police. They had suffered injuries but no fatalities.
    While the confrontations were underway on Greek Square, a group of Right Sector thugs were readying the main part of the operation, code-named “Ha’ola” – from the phrase “Mizbeach Ha’ola”, which in Hebrew means “the altar of burnt offering”. They slipped into the House of Trade Unions through the back entrance and fortified their positions in the basement and the attic. This group contained only proven fighters who were experienced killers.
    139769_originalWhile the masses were moving through the city’s center from Greek Square to Kulikovo Field, some of the provocateurs got into cars and sped ahead of most of the crowd, rushing into the tent camp and inciting a panic by shouting “Right Sector is on its way!” and “They’re coming to kill you!” and so on. Led by the provocateurs, many activists entered the House of Trade Unions instead of scattering throughout the city. Some of them went down to the basement from which no one emerged alive – there they were tortured, killed, and butchered with machetes. Others headed upstairs. Gasoline was mixed with napalm to form deadly, acrid carbon monoxide. The recipe for these deadly cocktails was created by chemists from Independence Square, but they were not used there. In Odessa, the mixture was employed for the first time and this was no accident: a massacre with a large number of fatalities was needed in order to terrorize the entire country.
    146401_originalThe “battle” for the House of Trade Unions lasted several hours – during which time some of the militants pretended to mount a resistance by tossing Molotov cocktails from the roof, while others methodically butchered, strangled, and incinerated their victims. In order to ensure that the fire could not be extinguished, water was completely shut off to the building.
    After “Ha’ola” was complete, the Right Sector murderers fled the building through the side and rear exits and left town. The police then entered the structure. The number that became the official death toll – 46 – included only the dead on the upper floors of the building. The majority of the victims, who were in the basement, were not counted. The exact number of dead is unlikely to ever be known, but most sources claim that between 120 and 130 were killed.
    The truth cannot be concealed
    The junta has privatized the police and the security service, but forgot about the prosecutor’s office. And now the acting attorney general, Oleh Makhnitsky has stated:
    “This action [in Odessa] was not prepared at some internal level, it was a well-planned and coordinated action in which some authorities’ representatives have taken part.”
    It is unlikely that he will be permitted to name those who are truly responsible for the tragedy. But the junta in Kiev will not be able to completely conceal the truth about what happened in Odessa. This tragedy should be thoroughly investigated and those culpable should be brought to the international trial for committed crimes against humanity. Nuremberg-2 is waiting for Turchinov & Co.
    Source in Russian: Antifascist
    Translated and adapted by ORIENTAL REVIEW
    OR’ UPDATE May 15, 2014 10.25 pm (MSK)

    Two extremely important phone intercepts were made public today:
    First is the telephone call of the Ukrainian oligarch of the Jewish origin Ihor Kolomoisky to former Ukrainian presidential candidate Oleg Tsarev, who is now leading the anti-fascist South-East resistance movement opposing Kiev’s junta. During the two-minutes talk Kolomoisky notes that a Jewish military man from Dnepropetrovsk (this region is currently a Kolomoisky’s barony) was killed on May 9 during clashes in Mariupol and warned Tsarev that the Jewish community in the city announced a bounty of 1 million US$ for Tsarev’s head. Kolomoisky also advised Tsarev to leave Ukraine. Full recording (in Russian):

    Later today another related talk was leaked to Internet. A close friend of Tsarev Oleg Noginsky was talking to the honorary consul of Israel in Ukraine Ian Epstein. Noginsky informs him about this Kolomoisky’s call to Tsarev and asks to confirm whether the Jewish community in Dnepropetrovsk has really declared the bounty. Epstein strongly denies it. During the following opinions exchange on Kolomoisky’s behaviour Noginsky mentions as the established fact that Kolomoisky has hired the thugs who burnt people in Odessa on May 2. His motive was to exterminate people’s resistance against junta in Odessa and install Ihor Palitsa as his puppet governor in this city (the latter assumed office on May 6). According to Noginsky, Kolomoisky repeatedly asked Turchinov and other junta leaders “to leave him Odessa to restore the same order as in Dnepropetrovsk”. He also claimed that Kolomoisky “got crazy” and “thinks he is a new Hitler”. Epstein is notably scared and insists that “Jews have nothing to do with this person”. He however agrees that the scandal, if made public, would be a game-changer for Ukraine.
    Ndryshuar për herë të fundit nga HFTengineer : 27-11-2016 më 23:01

  4. #24
    i/e regjistruar Maska e HFTengineer
    Anëtarësuar
    24-04-2016
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    469

    Për: Gati për luftë”, NATO 300 mijë forca në përballjen me Rusinë

    Ka mundsi qe mos ti fshini kto qe solla ti leni per gojmedhenjte dhe injorantete qe grrijne sallate dhe ripersrisn fajlet e veta, pa sjell anje fakt per ti mbrojtur.
    Ndryshuar për herë të fundit nga HFTengineer : 27-11-2016 më 23:08

  5. #25
    i/e regjistruar Maska e HFTengineer
    Anëtarësuar
    24-04-2016
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    469

    Për: Gati për luftë”, NATO 300 mijë forca në përballjen me Rusinë

    Citim Postuar më parë nga mesia4ever Lexo Postimin
    Tani mbeshtet nje rregjim qe bombardon spitalet me te semure bile edhe vet i bombardon. Kush e lavderon kete, perpos nje budalla, e ti je i tille, budallalleku nuk eshte monopol vetem i myslimaneve por zgjerohet dita dites ne tipa si ti.
    Ironia e lajmeve te ktyure.
    Sa ehste numri i te vdekurve te pa fajshem ne irak prej luftes qe na cuan amerikanet dhe neokensrevistat, te vdekurit ne afhganistan?

    Ca gjendje ehste iraku mbas luufte dhe sa emigrant jane dyturuar te hikin?


    Para se te besh moral.



    Tjeter gje e di ti sa veta kane vdekur nga rebelet sirjanet qe gjuane civilket?

    I kane eksekutuart


    Rebel forces in Syria killed as many as 190 civilians and seized more than 200 hostages during a military offensive in August, Human Rights Watch says.

    A report by the US-based group says the deaths occurred in villages inhabited predominantly by members of President Bashar al-Assad's minority Alawite sect near the coastal city of Latakia.
    It said the findings "strongly suggest" crimes against humanity were committed.
    The group has previously documented atrocities by pro-government forces.
    The report calls on the UN to impose an arms embargo on all groups where there is credible evidence of their involvement in war crimes.
    Analysis

    By James ReynoldsBBC News, Istanbul
    The attack documented by Human Rights Watch highlights the clear problem faced by countries which oppose Bashar al-Assad: the rebels whose cause they share are accused of the same kinds of crimes as the president they are trying to bring down. The scale may be different, but the impact is similar.
    The West has tried to address this problem by dividing the way it deals with the opposition. It provides support to the mainstream Free Syrian Army. At the same time, it has sought to prevent money and weapons reaching hardline Islamists and jihadists linked to al-Qaeda.
    But this appears to do little harm to the Islamist rebels' ability to fight. That is largely because they have their own sources of support - thought to include funding from individuals in the Gulf.
    The Syrian government has criticised the work of international human rights organisations. But it may choose to use the testimony collected by Human Rights Watch to reinforce its argument that Syria is facing a fight against foreign-backed terrorism.
    'Entire families targeted'
    Human Rights Watch says it conducted an on-site investigation in September and interviewed more than 30 people, including survivors and combatants on both sides.
    Its 105-page report says that in the early hours of 4 August fighters from several different rebel groups attacked and overran army positions in the Sheikh Nabhan area of the Latakia countryside. A soldier told HRW that about 30 of his comrades were killed in the assault.
    The rebels then entered the Alawite villages of Barouda, Nbeiteh, al-Hamboushieh, Blouta, Abu Makkeh, Beyt Shakouhi, Aramo, Bremseh, Esterbeh, Obeen, and Kharata.
    "Eight survivors and witnesses described how opposition forces executed residents and opened fire on civilians, sometimes killing or attempting to kill entire families who were either in their homes unarmed or fleeing from the attack, and at other times killing adult male family members, and holding the female relatives and children hostage," the report says.
    The report names 190 civilians killed by the rebels, including at least 57 women, 18 children and 14 elderly men. The total number of dead is likely higher because many residents remained missing and bodies were buried in mass graves, it adds.
    Opposition sources say the women and children taken hostage in the attack are still being held. Relatives said many appeared in the background of a video published online.
    http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-24486627





    -
    Syria's regime and rebels were locked in fierce clashes Sunday on the western edges of Aleppo, where 38 civilians have been killed in two days of opposition rocket fire, a monitor said.

    Among those killed over the two-day period were 14 children, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

    Another 250 civilians have been wounded in heavy bombardment by anti-government factions since Friday morning, according to the Britain-based group.

    The barrage is part of a major assault by rebels and allied jihadists to break a three-month government siege of Aleppo's eastern half, where more than 250,000 people still live.

    "Rebel fighters have launched hundreds of rockets and shells onto the western districts from positions inside the city and on its western edges," said Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman.

    He said the rebels were trying to push east from Dahiyet al-Assad district -- most of which they seized in the first day of the onslaught -- towards Hamdaniyeh.

    Hamdaniyeh is a regime-held district directly adjacent to opposition-controlled eastern neighbourhoods.

    Fighting lasted all night and into Sunday morning, with air strikes and artillery fire along the western battlefronts heard even in the eastern districts, an AFP correspondent there said.

    Plumes of smoke could be seen snaking up from the city's skyline.

    The offensive has seen an estimated 1,500 opposition fighters mass on the western edges of Aleppo since Friday.

    They include local Aleppo rebels and reinforcements from Idlib province to the west, among them the jihadist Fateh al-Sham Front, which changed its name from Al-Nusra Front after breaking ties with Al-Qaeda.


    http://www.france24.com/en/20161030-...aleppo-monitor





    https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/03/22/...kill-civilians


    New York) – Opposition armed groups in Syria have indiscriminately attacked civilians in government-held territory with car bombs, mortars, and rockets, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The attacks have killed and maimed hundreds of civilians and destroyed civilian infrastructure in violation of the laws of war.

    The 79-page report, “‘He Didn’t Have to Die’: Indiscriminate Attacks by Syrian Opposition Groups,” documents scores of attacks in heavily populated, government-controlled areas in Damascus and Homs between January 2012 and April 2014, and which continue into 2015. The findings are based primarily on victim and witness accounts, on-site investigations, publicly available videos, and information on social media sites.

    “We’ve seen a race to the bottom in Syria with rebel groups mimicking the ruthlessness of government forces with devastating consequences for civilians,” said Nadim Houry, deputy Middle East and North Africa director. “Civilians are paying the price, be it in government or rebel-held areas, with an inadequate international response.”



    Human Rights Watch documented seventeen car bombings and other improvised explosive device attacks in Jaramana, Damascus countryside, one in central Damascus, six in the Homs neighborhoods of al-Zahra and Akrama, and one in the village of Thabtieh in the Homs countryside. Many of these areas have a high concentration of religious minorities, including Christians, Druze, Shias, and Alawites, who are sometimes perceived to be supporting the government.

    The car bombings took place in commercial and residential areas, town centers, and in one case at a cemetery during a funeral. In several instances, two bombs exploded, one shortly after the other, in an apparent attempt to maximize deaths and injuries.

    Car bombings have continued, including a twin bombing on October 1 just outside an elementary school in Akrama, Homs that media reports said killed dozens of civilians, mostly children.

    In all of the car bomb attacks Human Rights Watch investigated, witnesses said there were no Syrian government military targets anywhere near the site. Besides being indiscriminate, many of these attacks seemed primarily intended to spread terror among the civilian population. No armed group claimed responsibility for most of the car bombings, though the extremist Islamist groups Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State (also known as ISIS) claimed responsibility for 10 of the 25 attacks documented in the report.

    Armed groups opposed to the government also frequently fired mortars, locally-made rockets, and other artillery into Damascus and its environs and Homs, in apparently indiscriminate attacks that caused numerous civilian casualties. Among hundreds of such attacks on Jaramana, at least six struck at or near schools that were full of children, two hit aid and shelter facilities, and four hit central residential areas.

    In Homs, armed opposition groups often shelled populated areas under government control. Although they frequently assert in public statements that they are attacking government forces, interviews with witnesses and visits to attack sites uncovered no evidence of military targets in the vicinity, which would make them indiscriminate and possibly deliberate attacks against civilians.

    Some armed opposition groups have indicated in public statements that all means are legitimate to fight the government of President Bashar al-Assad, saying that those living in areas under government control may be attacked in retaliation for attacks on civilians in opposition areas, and that populations perceived as associated with or supporting the government are subject to attack.

    Such arguments carry no validity under the laws of war. Regardless of the violations committed by Syrian government forces and pro-government militias, which Human Rights Watch has long documented, opposition armed groups are obligated to abide by the laws of war. Respect for the law does not depend on reciprocity – that law only need to be obeyed if the other side does so – but each party to the conflict has its own obligation to act in accordance with the law regardless of the other side’s actions.

    All warring parties, including rebel groups, are prohibited from conducting attacks that deliberately target civilians, that do not distinguish between civilians and combatants, and that cause civilian loss disproportionate to the expected military gain. Individuals who plan, order, or carry out unlawful attacks with criminal intent, including as a matter of command responsibility, are subject to prosecution for war crimes.

    In February 2014, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2139 demanding that “all parties immediately cease all attacks against civilians, as well as the indiscriminate employment of weapons in populated areas.” Yet the unlawful attacks by all parties to the conflict in Syria continue. The Security Council should refer the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court and impose an arms embargo on forces credibly implicated in widespread or systematic serious abuses, Human Rights Watch said.

    All parties to the conflict should end all deliberate, indiscriminate, and disproportionate attacks against civilians. Influential supporters, including political and religious leaders in Syria and abroad, should condemn all sides for unlawful attacks. Governments and individuals that provide military assistance to belligerents that commit widespread or systematic serious violations of the laws of war risk being complicit in those abuses – and should end their assistance.

    “With both sides ignoring the Security Council resolution condemning indiscriminate attacks, the council needs to take stronger steps to punish those committing war crimes,” Houry said.

    Witness Statements
    “I stumbled on a torn-off hand on the way. People closest to the car were all in pieces. Then I saw my father’s body on the ground. It was intact, but there was an injury – a hole – on the left side of his chest. His leg was broken, sticking out at an angle. I tried to clean his face and embraced him. I felt his last breath.” – Hani, describing the November 28, 2012 car bombing in Jaramana that killed his father and brother (November 2013).

    “I heard a low sound, I thought I was dreaming, then I felt the cement shaking, in a fraction of a second I was squeezed in between the rooftop and the floor… I realized that the small girl [my daughter] that was sleeping next to us died… I didn’t want to go to the hospital before I made sure everybody is alright, but they forced me…in the hospital I waited for them to come one after the other, hoping one of them would come in alive. But nobody did.” – Father describing the death of his wife and children in a suicide attack with an explosive-filled truck on November 4, 2013, in Thabtieh, Homs countryside (November 2013).

    “Mona was just finishing kindergarten and preparing to start school. We were talking about buying school supplies the following day. I don’t remember what happened, but when I woke up I was in the hospital and they told me that Mona had died.” – Mother describing a rocket attack on June 5, 2013, in Akrama, Homs (November 2013).

    “I was watching TV, my daughter was playing on the computer and my wife was sitting on the floor in the middle of the room when the rocket hit. I was conscious, shouting, but I couldn’t move because of the debris on top of me.” – Hady, describing a September 9, 2013 rocket attack in Akrama, Homs in which he, his son, 9, and his daughter, 28, were injured (November 2013).
    Ndryshuar për herë të fundit nga HFTengineer : 28-11-2016 më 00:01

  6. #26
    i/e regjistruar Maska e HFTengineer
    Anëtarësuar
    24-04-2016
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    469

    Për: Gati për luftë”, NATO 300 mijë forca në përballjen me Rusinë

    Gjeja tejeter per ironi keni goj dhe ftyre ju mbeturina te flisni mban mend rekord me bombradim:


    pari ne ne spital ne afghanistan ne 2015 :




    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-0...bing-hospitals

    Ahough the official explanation from U.S. officials inexplicably characterizes the bombing as an ostensibly horrible mistake, details of the harrowing 90-minute siege stretch the veracity of such a claim beyond the limits of feasibility. Médicins Sans Frontières has in place numerous safety precautions to protect both staff and patients — particularly since the organization treats any injured parties, regardless of affiliation, in conflict areas — including a staunch prohibition on weapons in their facilities.

    “A series of multiple, precise and sustained airstrikes targeted the main hospital building, leaving the rest of the buildings in the MSF compound comparatively untouched. This specific building of the hospital correlates exactly with the GPS coordinates provided to the parties of the conflict (GPS coordinates were taken directly in front of the main hospital building that was hit with the airstrikes).”

    Absolving itself of responsibility for what has been widely deemed a war crime, the Pentagon’s official explanation significantly downplays the attack as “a combination of human errors, compounded by process and equipment failures,” and that “fatigue and high operational tempo also contributed” to what it calls the “fog of war.”

    On 3 October 2015, a United States Air Force AC-130U gunship attacked the Kunduz Trauma Centre operated by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders in the city of Kunduz, in the province of the same name in northern Afghanistan. It has been reported that at least 42 people were killed and over 30 were injured.[2][3][4][5][6][7]









    Médecins Sans Frontières condemned the incident, saying all warring parties had been notified of the hospital's location ahead of time, and that the airstrike was deliberate, a breach of international humanitarian law and MSF is working on the presumption of a war crime.[8][9]

    The United States military initially said the airstrike was carried out to defend U.S. forces on the ground. Later, the United States commander in Afghanistan, General John F. Campbell, said the airstrike was requested by Afghan forces who had come under Taliban fire. Campbell said the attack was "a mistake", and "We would never intentionally target a protected medical facility."[10][11] Campbell said the airstrike was a US decision, made in the US chain of command.[12] Cockpit recordings showed that the AC-130 crew questioned the strike's legality.[13]

    Attacks on medical facilities are forbidden under international humanitarian law unless the facilities "are being used, outside their humanitarian function, to commit acts harmful to the enemy". Even if enemy combatants are inappropriately using the facility for shelter, the rule of proportionality usually forbids such attacks because of the high potential for civilian casualties.[25] Human Rights Watch said the laws of war require the attacking force to issue a warning, and wait a reasonable time for a response, before attacking a medical unit being misused by combatants.[25][33]

    At the time of the airstrikes, MSF was treating women and children and wounded combatants from both sides of the conflict. MSF estimates that of the 105 patients at the time of the attack, between 3 and 4 of the patients were wounded government combatants, while approximately 20 patients were wounded Taliban.[34] MSF general director Christopher Stokes said, "Some public reports are circulating that the attack on our hospital could be justified because we were treating Taliban. Wounded combatants are patients under international law, and must be free from attack and treated without discrimination. Medical staff should never be punished or attacked for providing treatment to wounded combatants."[34]

    Hospitals in war zones are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Former International Criminal Tribunal prosecutor M. Cherif Bassiouni suggested that the attack could be prosecuted as a war crime under the Conventions if the attack was intentional or if it represented gross negligence noting, "even if it were proven that the Kunduz hospital had lost that right of protection due to infiltration by Taliban, the U.S. military personnel responsible for the attack would have to prove it was a military necessity to strike that hospital", even if Taliban forces were indeed using it as a human shield, or else claim that the military was unaware of the hospital's location, risking prosecution for negligence.[35] Nonetheless, he said it is unlikely that the case will ever be tried in an international court, because "the U.S. is unlikely to turn any of their service members over to an outside body for prosecution even after facing its own military legal system."[35] Erna Paris speculated that concern over violation of international law may be the cause of the United States' delay in publishing its own report on the attack. She commented, "To leave MSF dangling would seriously undermine the established laws of war."[36]

    Writing about the attack, human rights lawyer Jonathan Horowitz noted of that "Under certain specific and narrowly tailored conditions, individuals can be attacked even when their actions fall short of carrying weapons or opening fire on the enemy. But this alone does not necessarily justify the attack on the hospital."[37] He emphasized the need for an independent investigation, noting that secrecy from the US and Afghanistan would be damaging to any investigation.[
    Ndryshuar për herë të fundit nga HFTengineer : 28-11-2016 më 00:04

  7. #27
    i/e regjistruar Maska e HFTengineer
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    Infant Formula Production Plant, Abu Ghraib, Iraq (January 21, 1991)

    On the seventh day of Operation Desert Storm, aimed at evicting Iraq military forces from Kuwait, the U.S.-led coalition bombed the Infant Formula Production Plant in the Abu Ghraib suburb of Baghdad. Iraq declared that the factory was exactly what its name said, but the administration of President George H.W. Bush claimed it was “a production facility for biological weapons.” Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chimed in to say, “It is not an infant formula factory. It was a biological weapons facility — of that we are sure.” The U.S. media chortled about Iraq’s clumsy, transparent propaganda, and CNN’s Peter Arnett was attacked by U.S. politicians for touring the damaged factory and reporting that “whatever else it did, it did produce infant formula.”

    Iraq was telling the truth. When Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defected to Jordan in 1995, he had every incentive to undermine Saddam, since he hoped the U.S. would help install him as his father-in-law’s successor — but he told CNN “there is nothing military about that place. … It only produced baby milk.” The CIA’s own investigation later concluded the site had been bombed “in the mistaken belief that it was a key BW [Biological Weapon] facility.” The original U.S. claims have nevertheless proven impossible to stamp out. The George W. Bush administration, making the case for invading Iraq in 2003, portrayed the factory as a symbol of Iraqi deceit. When the Newseum opened in 2008, it included Arnett’s 1991 reporting in a section devoted to — in the New York Times’ description — “examples of distortions that mar the profession.”

    Air Raid Shelter, Amiriyah, Iraq (February 13, 1991)

    The U.S. purposefully targeted an air raid shelter near the Baghdad airport with two 2,000-pound laser-guided bombs, which punched through 10 feet of concrete and killed at least 408 Iraqi civilians. A BBC journalist reported that “we saw the charred and mutilated remains. … They were piled onto the back of a truck; many were barely recognizable as human.” Meanwhile, Army Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff said: “We are chagrined if [civilian] people were hurt, but the only information we have about people being hurt is coming out of the controlled press in Baghdad.” Another U.S. general claimed the shelter was “an active command-and-control structure,” while anonymous officials said military trucks and limousines for Iraq’s senior leadership had been seen at the building.

    In his 1995 CNN interview, Hussein Kamel said, “There was no leadership there. There was a transmission apparatus for the Iraqi intelligence, but the allies had the ability to monitor that apparatus and knew that it was not important.” The Iraqi blogger Riverbend later wrote that several years after the attack, she went to the shelter and met a “small, slight woman” who now lived in the shelter and gave visitors unofficial tours. Eight of her nine children had been killed in the bombing.



    Red Cross complex, Kabul, Afghanistan (October 16 and October 26, 2001)

    At the beginning of the U.S-led invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. attacked the complex housing the International Committee of the Red Cross in Kabul. In an attempt to prevent such incidents in the future, the U.S. conducted detailed discussions with the Red Cross about the location of all of its installations in the country. Then the U.S. bombed the same complex again. The second attack destroyed warehouses containing tons of food and supplies for refugees. “Whoever is responsible will have to come to Geneva for a formal explanation,” said a Red Cross spokesperson. “Firing, shooting, bombing, a warehouse clearly marked with the Red Cross emblem is a very serious incident. … Now we’ve got 55,000 people without that food or blankets, with nothing at all.”



    Pa ju fut te vendete tjera vetem, ne asi .
    Ndryshuar për herë të fundit nga HFTengineer : 27-11-2016 më 23:57

  8. #28
    i/e regjistruar Maska e HFTengineer
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    Classified Iraq War Logs 109,032 deaths including 66,081 civilian deaths.


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casual...f_the_Iraq_War






    During the war in Afghanistan (2001–14), over 26,000 civilian deaths due to war-related violence have been documented; 29,900 civilians have been wounded.



    Mos futyemi ne libi , e evnde te tjera.
    Ndryshuar për herë të fundit nga HFTengineer : 28-11-2016 më 00:04

  9. #29
    i/e regjistruar Maska e Vinjol
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    Megjithe resepktin virtual qe kam ndaj teje di te them vetem dixka

    BOOOOOOOOOOOOO SA PIJEN ME SHERR QE E PASKE MORE BURRE



    HFTenginier
    Mos u mundo te behesh njeri i suksesshem por me mire te behesh i vlefshem..

  10. #30
    i/e regjistruar Maska e HFTengineer
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    Citim Postuar më parë nga Vinjol Lexo Postimin
    Megjithe resepktin virtual qe kam ndaj teje di te them vetem dixka

    BOOOOOOOOOOOOO SA PIJEN ME SHERR QE E PASKE MORE BURRE



    HFTenginier
    Te them te drejten kam repekt per ke do krishter ortodox sunit shia ateist agnostic.
    Por lepirsat cifut, saudit turk jane me te vettete injoranye qe refuzojne faktet per shkak te ideologjive te reja dhe duhet te kene per turp qe mbrojne kta njerez.

  11. #31
    i/e regjistruar Maska e HFTengineer
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    Për: Gati për luftë”, NATO 300 mijë forca në përballjen me Rusinë

    Citim Postuar më parë nga HFTengineer Lexo Postimin
    Te them te drejten kam repekt per ke do krishter ortodox sunit shia ateist agnostic.
    Por lepirsat cifut, saudit turk jane me te vettete injoranye qe refuzojne faktet per shkak te ideologjive te reja dhe duhet te kene per turp qe mbrojne kta njerez.
    Desga me shruar edhe cifutet qe nuk kane te implikuar apo qe nuk bejn networking.
    Besimi dhe politija jane personale por arrin diku kur duhen te oerballen me faktet

  12. #32
    Intifada verzioni 4.0 Maska e mesia4ever
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    Citim Postuar më parë nga arbereshi_niko Lexo Postimin
    Gjithesesi nuk me je drejtuar mua, une me pare se te pergjigjem do te uroj "mire se ardhjen" , gjithashtu "ngushellime" per Clinton-nen... :-)
    Ti shume e deshiroje te vinte ne pushtet ajo qe do te provonte forcen me Putin...
    Por ja qe amerikanet e kuptuan qe nuk eshte armiku i tyre Vladimir Putin, por izis dhe daesh apo al-nusra qe ti
    ( mos te rriten veshet pasi me "TI" dmth ata si ti... ) dhe Clinton i quani " opozite e moderuar ".
    Ja pra nga vjen edhe diskutimi i shtrembur qe ke per Putin, jo pse Kosova keshtu e bombat ne Alepo ashtu, jo Ukraina apo Krimea,
    jo Putin diktator qe ka uzurpuar "kolltukun" e presidentit per 40 vjet , jo terci e verci...............
    Spo kam kohe te te bej replike per te gjithe postimin por per kete pjese po te bej i nderuar.
    Kom pas qef ma shume me fitu Klintoni sepse ne shqiptaret e Kosoves kemi lidhje emocionale me shume me familjen Klinton, vetem per kete me shume pra kam patur deshire qe ajo te zgjidhej presidente.
    Klintoni e as Trump nuk mund t'i bejne balle Putinit. Putini kerkon nje dore te forte si Xhorxh Bushi apo Gjon Mek Kein, pra njerez qe jane provuar me luftera e tortura (i fundit) dhe qe nuk i frikesohen asaj. Ata skane qene dhe nuk do te ishin president qe nga studimet apo nga zyreja e biznesit hyjne ne presidence.
    Rusia nuk eshte armik direkt i ShBA-ve por me Putinin eshte vend kundershtar i tyre. Kete shumica e amerikaneve te informuar e dijne. Cfar budalle je bere si myslimanet e ketij forumi pa piken e logjikes, ty ste duket asgje e keqe qe nje njeri te qendroje ne pushtet deri ne vdekje dhe te beje luftera sulmuese ndaj kombeve e shteteve tjera sepse ato kombe apo shtete duan nje te ardhme me te mire per veten e tyre. A e di ti qe cdo njeri qe ka qendruar gjate ne pushtet dhe qe nuk ka dashur ta leshoje ate ai shtet ka shkuar ne tirani. Edhe ti ke patur nje drejtues si Putinin, Enver Hoxhen qe me shume vrau shqiptare dhe e izoloi vendin e tij nga bota e qyteteruar perendimore dhe shkoi me ruse e kineze puro komuniste. Po te shkonte me perendimin sot Shqiperia moti do te ishte ne BE dhe do te kishte standard jetese shume me te larte sesa qe ka sot. Keto probleme qe i ka sot do t'i zgjidhte viteve te 80'ta. Por keshtu edhe ne ate kohe ka patur shqiptare si ti qe nuk ua duan te miren vendit te tyre e as vetes se tyre madje.
    Ndryshuar për herë të fundit nga mesia4ever : 01-12-2016 më 12:22

  13. #33
    Intifada verzioni 4.0 Maska e mesia4ever
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    Citim Postuar më parë nga HFTengineer Lexo Postimin
    Classified Iraq War Logs 109,032 deaths including 66,081 civilian deaths.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casual...f_the_Iraq_War

    During the war in Afghanistan (2001–14), over 26,000 civilian deaths due to war-related violence have been documented; 29,900 civilians have been wounded.

    Mos futyemi ne libi , e evnde te tjera.
    Budalla keto vdekje jane te shkaktuara nga sulmet vetvrasese dhe nga lufterat e arabeve sunite dhe shiite ndermjet vete.
    Edhe ne Afganistan e njejta histori.

    Ne Libi ske pse futesh se sun del pastaj. Vlla Amerika e ka pergjegjesi te te ndihmoje qe te clirohesh, se ti pastaj e deshiron vellavrasjen Amerika ste ka faj. Po them 'ti' ne kuptim jo te drejtperdrejte.

  14. #34
    i/e regjistruar Maska e HFTengineer
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    Citim Postuar më parë nga mesia4ever Lexo Postimin
    Budalla keto vdekje jane te shkaktuara nga sulmet vetvrasese dhe nga lufterat e arabeve sunite dhe shiite ndermjet vete.
    Edhe ne Afganistan e njejta histori.

    Ne Libi ske pse futesh se sun del pastaj. Vlla Amerika e ka pergjegjesi te te ndihmoje qe te clirohesh, se ti pastaj e deshiron vellavrasjen Amerika ste ka faj. Po them 'ti' ne kuptim jo te drejtperdrejte.
    Ja injoranca. Numrat e deklaruaura nga amerika jane numra te vet vlersuaravlefsuara dhe nuk ka asnje orghanizate dnerkombtare humaniste qe i njef e para.

    E ke ne gazeten usa today qe nifet si gazet presigjoze

    http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/w...post/79686772/



    E dyta vedkjet drejtperdrejt dhe infrastuktura :


    A. The Iraq-Iran War lasted from 1980 to 1988 and during that time there were about 105,000 Iraqi deaths according to the Washington Post. (1,2)

    According to Howard Teicher, a former National Security Council official, the U.S. provided the Iraqis with billions of dollars in credits and helped Iraq in other ways such as making sure that Iraq had military equipment including biological agents This surge of help for Iraq came as Iran seemed to be winning the war and was close to Basra. (1) The U.S. was not adverse to both countries weakening themselves as a result of the war, but it did not appear to want either side to win.

    B: The U.S.-Iraq War and the Sanctions Against Iraq extended from 1990 to 2003.

    Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990 and the U.S. responded by demanding that Iraq withdraw, and four days later the U.N. levied international sanctions.

    Iraq had reason to believe that the U.S. would not object to its invasion of Kuwait, since U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, had told Saddam Hussein that the U.S. had no position on the dispute that his country had with Kuwait. So the green light was given, but it seemed to be more of a ****.

    As a part of the public relations strategy to energize the American public into supporting an attack against Iraq the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. falsely testified before Congress that Iraqi troops were pulling the plugs on incubators in Iraqi hospitals. (1) This contributed to a war frenzy in the U.S.

    The U.S. air assault started on January 17, 1991 and it lasted for 42 days. On February 23 President H.W. Bush ordered the U.S. ground assault to begin. The invasion took place with much needless killing of Iraqi military personnel. Only about 150 American military personnel died compared to about 200,000 Iraqis. Some of the Iraqis were mercilessly killed on the Highway of Death and about 400 tons of depleted uranium were left in that nation by the U.S. (2,3)

    Other deaths later were from delayed deaths due to wounds, civilians killed, those killed by effects of damage of the Iraqi water treatment facilities and other aspects of its damaged infrastructure and by the sanctions.

    In 1995 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. reported that U.N sanctions against on Iraq had been responsible for the deaths of more than 560,000 children since 1990. (5)

    Leslie Stahl on the TV Program 60 Minutes in 1996 mentioned to Madeleine Albright, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And – and you know, is the price worth it?” Albright replied “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think is worth it.” (4)

    In 1999 UNICEF reported that 5,000 children died each month as a result of the sanction and the War with the U.S. (6)

    Richard Garfield later estimated that the more likely number of excess deaths among children under five years of age from 1990 through March 1998 to be 227,000 – double those of the previous decade. Garfield estimated that the numbers to be 350,000 through 2000 (based in part on result of another study). (7)

    However, there are limitations to his study. His figures were not updated for the remaining three years of the sanctions. Also, two other somewhat vulnerable age groups were not studied: young children above the age of five and the elderly.

    All of these reports were considerable indicators of massive numbers of deaths which the U.S. was aware of and which was a part of its strategy to cause enough pain and terror among Iraqis to cause them to revolt against their government.

    C: Iraq-U.S. War started in 2003 and has not been concluded

    Just as the end of the Cold War emboldened the U.S. to attack Iraq in 1991 so the attacks of September 11, 2001 laid the groundwork for the U.S. to launch the current war against Iraq. While in some other wars we learned much later about the lies that were used to deceive us, some of the deceptions that were used to get us into this war became known almost as soon as they were uttered. There were no weapons of mass destruction, we were not trying to promote democracy, we were not trying to save the Iraqi people from a dictator.

    The total number of Iraqi deaths that are a result of our current Iraq against Iraq War is 654,000, of which 600,000 are attributed to acts of violence, according to Johns Hopkins researchers. (1,2)

    Since these deaths are a result of the U.S. invasion, our leaders must accept responsibility for them.




    Intervista e bernizkit te cias ne afganistan : http://dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu/brzezinski_interview






    series of factual studies, reports and comments on the state of Iraq’s infrastructure demonstrate the completely one-sided character of the war being prepared by the Bush administration, with all the resources of the world’s most powerful military machine. This material paints a picture of a small, impoverished nation whose basic civilian services, already badly compromised, would quickly break down during a US military assault.
    Iraq’s power, communications, water, sewage treatment and health facilities have not been allowed to recover from the extensive damage inflicted in the 1991 US-led Gulf War. Years of stringent UN sanctions have severely limited reconstruction, leaving the country’s services in such a state that they would disintegrate within days in the event of a US military strike, with serious consequences for the population.
    Reporting from Baghdad last month, Boston Globe correspondent Anthony Shadid, warned that the first days of US air attacks would, “devastate its [Iraq’s] tattered and already overwhelmed infrastructure, severing power to hospitals and water treatment plants, cutting off drinking water to millions in Baghdad and possibly elsewhere, and pouring raw sewage into the street within hours”. UN reports showed that even without further attacks, the country’s basic services stood “on the brink of collapse, a result of 12 years of UN sanctions”.
    Shadid’s estimate is supported by a report published by the Global Policy Forum in August 2001. It states: “Civilian infrastructure has suffered disproportionately from the lack of maintenance and investment. For example, Iraq’s electrical sector is barely holding production steady at one-third of its 1990 capacity even though government expenditure in the sector consistently exceeds plans. Electrical shortages, worst during the hot summers, spoil food and medicine and stop water purification, sewage treatment and irrigated agriculture, interfering with all aspects of life.”
    In the event of war, the breakdown of power supplies to hospitals, together with the shortage of medical equipment, medicines and drugs resulting from sanctions, would make it impossible for Iraq to treat, let alone contain, cholera, typhoid, dysentery and other diseases associated with contaminated water and untreated sewage.
    According to one veteran UN aid official in Baghdad, 11 years of deprivation caused by the 1991 war and UN sanctions have seriously undermined the general health of people and their ability to ward off sickness. “People will be far more vulnerable to future attack than before; they are weaker, and they have little resistance,” he said. “It (war) is going to be horrendous for lots and lots of people.”
    Moreover, the horrific injuries caused by US bombing would go substantially untreated. UN sanctions have prohibited the import of medical equipment such as x-ray machines, incubators, and heart and lung machines, together with vaccines, analgesics and chemotherapy drugs that the UN Security Council claims could be converted into chemical and biological weapons. Another drug on the UN proscribed list is morphine, one of the most effective painkillers, meaning that thousands of injured will endure terrible pain.
    The newspaper Salaam reported last month that Iraq’s 130 remaining hospitals, built in the 1960s and 1980s, are in an advanced state of disrepair with cracked and broken windows, damaged doors and leaking roofs. The hospitals’ aging sewerage and ventilation systems are prone to breakdown because of lack of maintenance and parts. The country’s system of primary health centres, comprised of a thousand dispensaries, is struggling to operate. Many clinics lack basic requirements such as stethoscopes and sterilising equipment and pharmaceuticals.
    Once US hostilities begin, the population will be hit by severe food shortages as sanctions are tightened. The UN program allowing the sale of oil, with part of the revenue going toward the purchase of food, will be automatically terminated. Limited internal food resources exist because a significant proportion of Iraq’s agricultural resources, including farms, machinery and irrigation systems, were destroyed in 1991.
    UN agencies in Iraq are drawing up contingency plans to prepare for the impending catastrophe. According to media reports, the Red Cross is stockpiling medical supplies, tents and water filtration units in Iraq, Iran and Jordan. Such emergency measures will be woefully inadequate. Under conditions of war and siege, with roads, bridges and airstrips disabled, it will be nigh impossible to distribute aid.
    There is evidence that crippling of Iraq’s infrastructure has been deliberate and central to a long-term US perspective to assert dominance over the country. Not only has the US government sought to cause the maximum amount of damage in order to undermine the capacity of the Iraq people to resist, it has aimed to incite popular discontent, hoping to fuel a rebellion against the Saddam Hussein regime.
    Barton Gellman, a staff writer for the Washington Post, writing soon after the 1991 conflict, observed that: “Some targets, especially later in the war, were bombed primarily to create postwar leverage over Iraq, not to influence the course of the conflict itself.” Gellman quoted Colonel John A Warden, deputy director of Air Force strategy, doctrine and plans: “One purpose of destroying Iraq’s electrical grid was that you have imposed a long-term problem on the leadership that it has to deal with sometime.” Gellman added: “It gives us long-term leverage.”
    Former UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, Denis Halliday, who resigned from the position in disgust in 1998, contends that epidemics of cholera, dysentery and hepatitis that have plagued Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War were the direct result of the US deliberately targeting Iraq’s infrastructure. He cites a recently released declassified US Defense Intelligence Agency document from the start of the conflict, pointing out Iraq’s vulnerable water situation. The document predicted that the shortage of pure drinking water resulting from the bombing of infrastructure could “lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease”.
    “I think there’s no doubt whatsoever that the Americans had worked out the vulnerability of Iraq in terms of clean fresh water,” Halliday said. “So they set about destroying electrical power capacity, which is essential, of course, for the treatment and distribution of water.”
    Halliday estimated that by 1999 the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure and UN sanctions had directly caused the deaths of 600,000 children and 500,000 adults through malnutrition and disease. Tens of thousands more people, military and civilian, were killed in the US-led military assault. What will be the cost in human suffering of Washington’s next criminal venture in the Gulf?
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    Crisate e emigracjonit gjate bombardimeve te iraqkut dhe intervencionit te gjithe ktyre vietve :




    Iraqi refugees[edit]



    There are more than 4.7 million refugees of Iraq, more than 16.3% of the population. Two million fled Iraq while approximately 2.7 million are internally displaced people.[15] The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated on April 29, 2008 that 2 million Iraqis had fled to neighboring countries and 2.7 million were displaced internally, with nearly 100,000 Iraqis fleeing to Syria and Jordan each month.[16][17][18]

    Roughly 40% of Iraq's middle class is believed to have fled, the U.N. said. Most are fleeing systematic persecution and have no desire to return.[19] All kinds of people, from university professors to bakers, have been targeted by militias, insurgents and criminals. An estimated 331 school teachers were slain in the first four months of 2006, according to Human Rights Watch, and at least 2,000 Iraqi doctors have been murdered and 250 kidnapped since the 2003 U.S. invasion.[20] Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan live in impoverished communities with little international attention to their plight and little legal protection.[21][22] Many of the Iraqi women fleeing the war in Iraq are turning to prostitution.[23]

    Although Christians represent less than 5% of the total Iraqi population, they make up 40% of the refugees now living in nearby countries, according to U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.[24][25] UNHCR estimates that Christians comprise 24% of Iraqis currently seeking asylum in Syria.[26][27] The census in 1987 counted 1.4 million Christians, however since the 2003 invasion radicalized Iraqi culture, the total number of Christians dropped to about 500,000, half of which live in Baghdad




    On December 15, 2007 a conference dedicated to orphans in Iraq was held in Baghdad. Moussa Faraj, chief of Iraq's anti-corruption board reported that official government statistics revealed that there were five million orphans in Iraq. During the same conference, Wijdan Salem Mikhail, the Iraqi Minister of Human Rights, stated that the phenomenon of orphans in Iraq "is one of the most passive things that grew immensely during the past few years due to destructive wars and unbridled violence in the country." The Iraqi parliament's women and family committee have proposed a draft law to set up a fund for the orphans.[10]

    On January 21, 2008 an NGO called Monitoring Net of Human Rights in Iraq (MHRI) said the Iraqi Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs released a report estimating that there were 4.5 millions Iraqi orphans, with 500,000 living on the streets without any home or family care. The report further said there were only 459 orphans in governmental houses of orphans while there were 800 Iraqi orphans in American Iraqi prisons. Amal Kashefal-Ghetaa, the president of the Islamic Foundation of Woman and Child, explained that "a massive change took place in the lives of children that forced many of them to leave their schools and friends to go to work; a matter that affects them mentally.” Sociologist Atheer Kareem said the negative situation that children in Iraq are experiencing would increase their suffering unless the government in Iraq responds by issuing legislation.[11]

    In March 2012, Nael al-Musawi, the chairman of the Baghdad Provincial Council's social welfare committee reported on the Council's draft law to provide comprehensive care for orphaned children in Iraq. He stated that "there are around 100,000 orphans in Baghdad," noting that "this number differs from estimates made by some local civil society organisations, which claimed the number of orphaned children in Baghdad alone has surpassed one million." He also reported that the Council estimates "the overall number of orphans across Iraq to be no more than 400,000." A report from the United Nations in 2008 said that there was "around 870,000 children orphaned by the death of one or both parents in Iraq."[12]

    A survey headed by UNICEF called the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey 2011 (MICS4), published in December 2012, measured the prevalence of orphans in Iraq. The survey found that, "about five percent of children aged 0-17 years are orphans who have lost one or both parents, and about two percent are not living with a biological parent and 92 percent of children live with both parents." The highest proportion of orphans was found in the governorates of Diala, Baghdad and Al-Anbar. A report on the survey published by the BBC estimated that these rates correspond to a finding that "between 800,000 to a million Iraqi children have lost one or both of their parents." The survey was the largest ever conducted in Iraq, sampling 36,580 households.[13][14]


    Por hapi rugen isit qe ishin te mbytur para se


    S addam Hussein rose to power in the 1970s on a wave of nationalist, revolutionary sentiment that had been sweeping the Middle East for years. It was a time of upheaval, in which the political and feudal elites—the allies of the old European colonial powers—were losing their grip. In Egypt, a young military officer named Gamal Abdel Nasser had led a revolt against the British-backed king in 1952. Nasser’s revolution inspired a wave of rebellions in the 1950s and ’60s, stretching from Libya to Syria to Iraq.

    By the early 1970s, Hussein oversaw the seizure of Iraqi oil assets from foreign companies just as oil prices were beginning to rise sharply. After nationalizing the oil industry, Hussein used the profits to modernize Iraq’s countryside by distributing land to farmers and mechanizing agricultural production. He also led a campaign to expand education and healthcare; build roads and highways; and create new industries. Iraq became one of the richest and most developed countries in the Arab world. But Hussein also ruthlessly suppressed all opposition and dragged his country into two successive—and spectacularly destructive—wars with its neighbors. Under his rule, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were arrested, tortured, executed, or disappeared. His ruling Sunni Arab minority persecuted the country’s Shiites and ethnic Kurds.

    For much of his reign, and especially after he invaded Iran in 1980, Hussein was backed by the United States, Europe, and most Arab governments. Hussein had feared that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the charismatic leader of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, would inspire the Shiite majority in Iraq to rise up against Baathist rule. During the eight-year war with Iran, the United States and other Western powers supplied Hussein with weapons and military intelligence that prolonged the fighting. It was only after he invaded Kuwait in 1990 that the West turned against him. Despite a disastrous loss to a US-led alliance in the 1991 Gulf War, Hussein clung to power and survived more than a decade of United Nations sanctions and weapons inspections.

    After the 2003 US invasion, Hussein became the first modern Arab leader to be deposed by a foreign power. After a trial marred by charges of US interference and procedural flaws, an Iraqi court convicted him of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by hanging. That earned Hussein another distinction: as the first modern Arab ruler to be tried and executed for his crimes.

    In a region filled with US-allied dictators, many Arabs admired Hussein for his willingness to challenge the world’s sole superpower and his support for the Palestinians in their struggle with Israel. Arabs also respected Hussein for his rhetoric of “liberating” Jerusalem and restoring old Arab glories, much like his hero, the 12th-century Muslim conqueror Salahuddin. “For a long time, Saddam was more popular in the Arab world than he was inside Iraq. That’s because most Arabs did not grasp the full extent of his cruelty,” Zuheir al Jezairy, a prominent Iraqi writer and journalist, told me after Hussein’s execution. “To them, he was an Arab leader who stood up to the West. To Iraqis, he was a tyrant.”

    * * *

    The vengeful and sectarian way in which Hussein was killed deepened the civil war that had been raging inside Iraq since early 2006—Sunni violence against Shiites, followed by Shiite reprisals. And if there wasn’t a deep-rooted Sunni-Shiite rift in the region before Hussein’s hanging, there certainly was one after. In the days following his execution, Hussein emerged as a Sunni Arab hero who stood calm and defiant as his Shiite executioners tormented him. “No one will ever forget the way in which Saddam was executed,” then–Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot. “They turned him into a martyr.”

    Sunnis framed the hasty execution as an act of sectarian vengeance, shrouded in political theater and overseen by the American occupation. In several Arab capitals, Sunni protesters railed against the United States, Israel, and “Persians”—a code word for Shiites. Sunnis across the region saw the United States and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government as killing off the last vestiges of Arab nationalism. Although Hussein was once a dependable ally of the West, by the 1990s he was among the few Arab leaders who defied the United States and European powers, at least rhetorically. In the Sunni view, America and its allies eradicated the idea of a glorious Arab past without offering any replacement for it, other than sectarianism.

    In Beirut in the days after Hussein’s execution, I watched as his killing heightened a sectarian battle between Hezbollah and its Sunni and Christian rivals.
    I was in Beirut during Hussein’s execution. In the days that followed, I watched as his killing heightened a sectarian battle between Hezbollah, the Shiite Lebanese political movement and militia supported by Iran, and its Sunni and Christian rivals, who were supported by Saudi Arabia and the United States.

    A week after the execution, hundreds of members of the Lebanese Baath Party marched in a Sunni neighborhood behind a symbolic coffin representing that of Hussein. They offered a funeral prayer and plastered walls with posters praising “Saddam the martyr.” The posters showed Hussein standing up in court in Baghdad, photoshopped against an image of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. “May God damn America and its spies,” one banner draped across a major Beirut thoroughfare declared. “Our condolences to the nation for the assassination of Saddam Hussein, and victory to the Iraqi resistance.”

    Lebanon was a case study in blowback from the Iraq War. By January 2007, Lebanese Sunnis felt besieged. Fearing that the sectarian bloodbath in Baghdad would spread to Lebanon, and fearing as well Iran’s regional power, they began to lash out at Shiites. As they confronted Hezbollah supporters during a nationwide strike in late January, some Sunnis waved posters and banners praising Hussein. It was a rich contradiction: Sunnis aligned with the United States carrying posters of Hussein, a dictator that America had spent billions of dollars and lost thousands of lives to depose. But in other ways, it was also a declaration of sectarian war: Hussein had killed hundreds of thousands of Shiites in Iraq, where many Lebanese Shiites have relatives, and the two communities—Lebanese and Iraqi Shiites—have had close ties for decades.

    And in death, a new narrative emerged about the Iraqi dictator: that he had blocked Iranian dominance of the region, and had stood up to Israel. “Hussein, as Iraq’s ruler, was an iron curtain that prevented Iranian influence from reaching into the Arab world,” wrote Bilal Khubbaiz, a political analyst, in Al Hayat, a Saudi-owned pan-Arab newspaper. He also praised Hussein as “a formidable player in the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

    One of Hussein’s legacies is the marriage of convenience between Baath Party officers and Sunni militants of ISIS.
    Saudi Arabia had sought to isolate Hussein after he invaded Kuwait in 1990. But the House of Saud feared an Iranian-allied Shiite government in Baghdad even more. The Saudi press went out of its way to praise Hussein after his death: Saudi-owned outlets published paeans eulogizing Hussein, with one even vowing revenge against Maliki, who had signed the death warrant. “O believers, prepare the gun that will avenge Hussein,” said the unsigned poem published in several newspapers. “The criminal who signed the execution order without valid reason cheated us on our celebration day. How beautiful it will be when the bullet goes through the heart of him who betrayed Arabism.”

    * * *

    Today, Hussein leaves a new legacy in Iraq: a marriage of convenience between former officers of his Baath Party and Sunni militants like those of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The jihadists assumed the most prominent role as they swept through northern and central Iraq in mid- to late-2014. But they were able to capture large swaths of territory from the Iraqi government thanks to an alliance with a network of former Hussein regime loyalists who had deep ties to Sunni tribes in cities like Mosul and Tikrit. After taking control of Mosul and other Sunni cities, ISIS leaders pushed aside the ex-Baathists or absorbed them into the group’s ranks.

    The ex-Baathists, who include former intelligence officers and elite Republican Guard troops, coalesced in 2007—soon after the Shiite-led government in Baghdad executed Hussein—as a group called the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order (named after a Sufi order). The group’s leader is Izzat al-Douri, who was Hussein’s right-hand man and the most wanted member of the ousted Baathist regime to remain at large since the US invasion of Iraq. The Naqshbandi Order sought to counter Iranian influence, tap into the disillusionment of Iraq’s Sunni community, and try to restore Sunni rule over the country. Soon after ISIS militants captured Mosul in June 2014, with help from the Naqshbandi Order and its tribal allies, Douri issued an audio message praising the Sunni militants and urging Iraqis to join the fight. “Join the ranks of the rebels who liberated half the country,” he said. “The liberation of Baghdad is around the corner. Everyone should contribute to complete the liberation of the beloved country, because there is no honor or dignity without it.”

    After US forces ousted Hussein’s regime in April 2003, several top Baathist officials, including Douri, went into hiding and began to mastermind the Sunni-led insurgency. In the fall of 2003, American officials said Douri was involved in recruiting foreign jihadists and funding attacks on US troops. That assessment was based on accounts from captured members of Ansar al-Islam, an Al Qaeda–linked group that carried out a series of suicide bombings against US forces and Iraqi civilians. US officials said Douri and other ex-Baathist leaders then fled to neighboring Syria, where they reportedly worked with Syrian intelligence operatives to reestablish elements of the Baath Party within Iraq. After Hussein’s execution, the ex-Baathists became more active through the Naqshbandi Order. Some ex-Baathists also enhanced their alliance with the Sunni militants of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which would later morph into ISIS.

    Both the Baathists and Islamic militants were able to cultivate support from ordinary Sunnis who were alienated by the sectarian policies of Nouri al-Maliki, the Dawa Party leader who served as Iraq’s prime minister from 2006 to 2014. In recent months, investigations by several news organizations, including The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, and Reuters, revealed that former Iraqi Baathists are playing a key role in ISIS, especially as leaders of its shadowy military and security apparatuses. Because the Baathists have deep social, financial, and cultural ties to many areas that are now under ISIS control, it will be difficult for the Iraqi government to dislodge the militants from those areas. And even when Baghdad has recaptured territory, the militants and their Baathist allies have undermined the central government’s efforts to restore order.

    Since the new Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, took office in September 2014, Sunni political leaders have made several demands on him: amnesty for tens of thousands of Sunnis imprisoned—in many cases without judicial review—by Maliki’s regime in the name of fighting terrorism; greater power in the new government; an end to aerial bombardment of Sunni towns; and a more significant role in the Iraqi security forces, which Maliki had cleansed of many senior Sunni officers.

    Today, Shiite militias often take the lead in the fight against ISIS and other jihadists, and in the process are further alienating the Sunni community. Many Sunnis cringe at the memories evoked by the reestablishment of Shiite militias, which carried out widespread kidnappings, torture, and killing of Sunnis during the sectarian war that raged in Iraq from 2005 through 2008. In a February 2015 report, Human Rights Watch found that Shiite militias escalated their abuses in Sunni areas as they carried out new offensives against ISIS. The militias have been accused of forcing thousands of Sunnis out of their homes, kidnapping or detaining hundreds of residents, and summarily executing 72 civilians in Diyala province.

    After his ignoble death by hanging, Hussein remains a potent symbol that inflames sectarian tensions. He was buried in a tomb in his birthplace of Awja, a town near the city of Tikrit and about 100 miles north of Baghdad. While the mausoleum was not as lavish as the ostentatious palaces Hussein had built for himself, the site was intended by his fellow tribesmen to burnish his legacy as a nationalist and pan-Arab hero. Hundreds of people toured the tomb each week until the Iraqi government closed it to the public in 2012. Posters of Hussein covered the mausoleum, photographs of different stages of his life lined the walls, and a large Iraqi flag was draped on his grave.

    In March 2015, Hussein’s tomb was reduced to rubble as Iraqi security forces and Shiite militias fought to regain control of Tikrit from ISIS militants. Months earlier, worried that Shiite militias or ISIS would destroy the tomb, members of Hussein’s tribe had moved his remains to a secret location. But the destruction of his tomb became another chapter in the sectarian war of images, with Sunnis blaming Shiite militias even though ISIS may have damaged it just as badly. The militias planted their flags in the rubble, along with pictures of General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Soleimani has led Iran’s campaign to stabilize the Baghdad government; train and equip thousands of Shiite militia fighters; and coordinate efforts to recapture territory from ISIS. On some walls in Tikrit, Persian graffiti read, “Khomeini’s army defeated ISIS.” It was a message from the Shiite militias: in death, the legacy of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini would outlast that of Saddam Hussein.

    But in reality, Hussein’s legacy will continue to haunt Iraq as long as Sunni grievances are unresolved, and the country’s new Shiite rulers resist sharing power with the Sunni minority. At the same time, Sunnis need to move beyond pining for the glory days of Hussein and his brutal Baathist regime—a reign that set Iraq on a path of destruction.





    Amerika jo vetem qe prishi infrastuktuern bombardoi vgenjeu, por ishte aktori kryesor per lrizen e lindur nga isis.






    Amerika paska shkuar per paqe ,po nekonesravtsiat qe ben luften?


    E ke ne gazeten vox :
    http://www.vox.com/2016/2/16/1102210...oconservatives

    prehensive guide to the neoconservatives and their works.

    The book’s larger story is of the enormous influence wielded by unelected lobbyists and officials over the foreign policies of supposed democracies, their task facilitated by the privatisation and outsourcing of more and more governmental functions in the neoliberal era. (Similar questions are provoked by the state-controlled or corporate media in general, as it frames, highlights or ignores ­information.)

    The more specific story is of how a small network of like-minded colleagues (Ahmad provides a list of 24 key figures), working against other unelected officials in the State Department, military and intelligence services, first conceived and then enabled America’s 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, a disaster that continues to overshadow regional and global relations today.

    The first crop of neoconservatives emerged from a Trotsky­ist-tinged 1930s New York Jewish intellectual scene; they and their descendants operated across the political-cultural spectrum, in media and academia, think tanks and pressure groups. Hovering first around the Democratic Party, then around the Republicans, they moved steadily rightwards, and sought to form a shadow defence establishment. During the Cold War they were fiercely ­anti-Soviet. Under George W Bush they shifted from the lobbies into office.

    The neoconservative worldview is characterised by militarism, unilateralism and a firm commitment to Zionism. Even the Israel-friendly British foreign secretary Jack Straw said of the neocon Irving Libby: “It’s a toss-up whether Libby is working for the Israelis or the Americans on any given day.” The neoconservatives aimed for an Israelisation of American policy, conflating Israeli and American enemies.

    Of course this powerful influence wasn’t the only one. Ahmad recognises the military-industrial complex is always enthusiastic for war, and writes: “The neoconservatives succeeded because they operate within a political consensus that sees US global dominance as the desired end and military force as the necessary, if not preferred, means.”

    Nevertheless, the fact that neoconservatives were placed well enough to exploit the terrorist attacks of September 11 was the crucial element in the decision to invade.

    The neoconservatives wanted (through “creative chaos”) to remake not only Iraq but also Iran, Syria, Lebanon and even such crucial American allies as Saudi Arabia. Yet their messianic vision didn’t dominate administration “realists” (Colin Powell and Richard Armitage were working on “smarter” sanctions to contain the Iraqi regime) until the “catalysing event” of 9/11.

    They immediately seized the opportunity to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, promoting claims made by Laurie Mylroie, who had also, improbably, held Iraq responsible for the 1995 Oklahoma bombing and the 1993 World Trade Center attack.

    Within the administration, Dick Cheney, a “robust nationalist”, championed neoconservative perspectives and propaganda. Supposed evidence of Iraq’s WMD programmes was entirely furnished by the neoconservatives and their allies.

    That unfounded allegations were presented as casus belli to the United Nations was not an “intelligence failure” but, Ahmad proves, the result of a successful process of suppressing, spinning or promoting information for the sake of invasion.

    Cheney was motivated not by neoconservative ideology but by a hard-nosed (and unrealistic) realism. For him, 9/11 was an opportunity to make an example of an easy target. But he was greatly influenced by the neoconservative Orientalist and popular historian Bernard Lewis, who held Arab rage against the West to be purely cultural, not political, and believed Arabs only understood the language of force. These assumptions played a part in “shock and awe” over Baghdad.

    Iraq proved America’s weakness rather than its strength. The American public was briefly awed; the rest of the world was only shocked by American recklessness. More Iraqi post-war oil contracts were awarded to states which hadn’t intervened than to those which had, while insurgencies steadily bled American lives and morale, and the region plummeted to greater depths of polarisation and instability.



    Neoconservatives had hoped Saddam’s deposal would weaken the Iranian theocracy, but this was their most dramatic miscalculation. Strengthened by the removal of hostile regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran took advantage of the new order to embed itself in Iraqi politics. By the end of Bush’s presidency, the “realist” realisation that Arab democracies would produce economically nationalist and anti-Zionist governments was reasserted, and so therefore was the traditional dictator-friendly policy.

    Eleven years after the invasion, “realist” folly has compounded neoconservative madness. One common thread between the schools is an abiding refusal to deal with the people at the grassroots struggling to improve their situation. After the 1991 Gulf War, America permitted Saddam’s defeated military to use helicopter gunships to put down the intifada in the south – the mass graves of this period incubated the later sectarian breakdown. In 2003 the neoconservatives pinned their hopes on Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, an exile organisation as irrelevant on the ground as the Syrian National Coalition is today (the SNC enjoys tepid and purely rhetorical American support; the grassroots Local Coordination Committees enjoy no recognition whatsoever). And now, rather than providing effective weaponry to the Free Syrian Army which has been fighting ISIS all year, America loses hearts and minds by bombing Syria’s grain silos and oil installations.

    If the region is to ever recover, imperial democracies as well as Arab tyrannies require further democratisation and greater accountability. This is one unspoken lesson of Ahmad’s very useful account.

    Robin Yassin-Kassab is the author of the novel The Road From D




    A movement of high-minded ideologues had, throughout the 1990s, become obsessed with deposing Saddam Hussein. When they assumed positions of power under Bush in 2001, they did not seek to trick America into that war, but rather tricked themselves. In 9/11, and in fragments of intelligence that more objective minds would have rejected, they could see only validation for their abstract and untested theories about the world — theories whose inevitable and obvious conclusion was an American invasion of Iraq.

    This is perhaps not as satisfying as the "Bush lied, people died" bumper sticker history that has since taken hold on much of the left and elements of the Tea Party right. Nor is it as convenient as the Republican establishment's polite fiction that Bush was misled by "faulty intelligence."

    If the problem were merely that Bush lied, then the solution would be straightforward: Check the administration's facts. But how do you fact-check an ideology, particularly when that ideology is partially concealed from the public view? How do you guard against that ideology, which still dominates much of the GOP, and some of whose ideas are shared by more hawkish Democrats, from leading us astray again?

    The moment at Saturday's debate should highlight the degree to which many Americans, from voters right up to presidential candidates, still misunderstand — and failed to learn from — the story of how America came to expend 4,500 of its citizens' lives in a war that would kill well over 100,000 Iraqis, destroy an entire nation, and help send the Middle East spiraling into chaos.

    Why did the United States invade Iraq?


    AFP/Getty
    An undated file photo of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
    To understand the American decision to invade Iraq, and to learn the lessons of that mistake, one must begin not with George W. Bush's claims of Iraqi WMDs or with the 9/11 attacks, but rather with a series of initially obscure ideological debates on elements of the American right.

    Those debates, which played out throughout the 1990s, had their roots in disagreements within the Republican Party over American power — and in the evolution of a right-leaning but surprisingly heterodox intellectual movement known as neoconservatism.

    Neoconservatism, which had been around for decades, mixed humanitarian impulses with an almost messianic faith in the transformative virtue of American military force, as well as a deep fear of an outside world seen as threatening and morally compromised.

    This ideology stated that authoritarian states were inherently destabilizing and dangerous; that it was both a moral good and a strategic necessity for America to replace those dictatorships with democracy — and to dominate the world as the unquestioned moral and military leader.

    Neoconservatism's proponents, for strategic as well as political reasons, would develop an obsession with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. That obsession would, by the end of the decade, congeal into a policy, explicitly stated: regime change.

    Their case was always grandly ideological, rooted in highly abstract and untested theories about the nature of the world and America's rightful place in it. Their beliefs were so deeply held that when 9/11 shook the foundations of American foreign policy, they were able to see only validation of their worldview, including their belief in the urgent need to bring democracy to Iraq.

    It was this ideological conviction, more than any piece of intelligence or lie told about it, that primarily led America into Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction were the stated justification, but they were never the real reason, nor was bad intelligence.

    The lesson of the Iraq mistake is not the dangers of lying or of anything as narrow as faulty intelligence, but rather of sweeping ideologies and ambitions that can take on a momentum all their own.

    That particular ideology, neoconservatism, remains a major force in the Republican Party, and a number of its tenets are held by some Democrats as well. Its mandate for war, and its faith in the power of American military force, still animates that ideology, particularly toward the Middle East.

    It is remarkable and alarming that more than a decade and thousands of lives later, neither Republicans nor Americans more broadly have fully confronted how that ideology developed to lead us into a catastrophic war — and the dangers that it, or any other blindly fervent ideology on the right or the left, could still pose.

    The radical ideas that led to the neoconservative obsession with Iraq


    David Hume Kennerly/Getty
    In 1991, President George H.W. Bush talks to reporters about US military operations in Iraq, flanked by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Chair of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell.
    The story of neoconservatism's evolution in the 1990s begins and ends with Iraq, but at its start it was a disagreement among Republicans.

    In late 1990, Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded the oil-rich neighboring kingdom of Kuwait, and a few months later President George H.W. Bush led a brief military intervention to expel Saddam.

    But where many Americans saw a rousing success, and the start of a decade that they would experience as overwhelmingly peaceful, a dissident faction of Republicans in and outside of the administration experienced it as a formative moment of national disgrace.

    As the American-led mission wound down, the elder Bush urged Iraqis to rise up. But Bush had stopped the war short of destroying Saddam's Republican Guard or his helicopter units, which were able to quickly crush the short-lived Iraqi uprising.

    "A decision was not made — a decision happened and you can't say when or how"
    Some administration officials, particularly then-Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, argued that the US should intervene against Saddam's crackdown — if not to aid in regime change, then at least to stop the slaughter.

    Wolfowitz "wanted to finish Saddam's regime, and not only did he want to finish it, he believed there was a strong basis for doing so," Richard Perle, another major neoconservative figure, told the journalist George Packer for his book The Assassins' Gate.

    Wolfowitz, an idealist and humanitarian, had long believed in America's responsibility to promote democracy abroad. In the mid-1980s, as Ronald Reagan's assistant secretary of state for East Asia, Wolfowitz successfully pushed for the US to abandon Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who, though a reliable anti-communist, was violent and corrupt.

    For Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives in the elder Bush administration, the 1991 Gulf War embodied of everything that was morally wrong — and indeed dangerous — with America's practice of tolerating dictators.

    Throughout the 1990s, Saddam Hussein only became more defiant and disobedient, ignoring United Nations mandates on weapons inspections and issuing increasingly anti-American rhetoric. While many Middle East analysts suspected Saddam's actions were primarily designed to help him save face at home after his humiliating 1991 defeat against the Americans, neoconservatives saw not just American humiliation but alarming evidence of American decline.

    This played into a growing school of thought among the dissident Republicans, which went far beyond Iraq. It said that America had a special responsibility to spread democracy for the betterment of humanity, that Republicans had forgotten the world-changing idealism of Ronald Reagan, and that the end of the Cold War was not an excuse for America to retreat from its military adventurism but rather the moment when it was needed most.

    A historian and scholar named Robert Kagan helped lead this charge. He argued that America's unilateral assertion of power — the mere fact of American military action — was not just strategically but morally necessary. It would spread democracy and thus human rights, but also deter rogue states and thus promote peace.

    In 1996, Kagan co-authored, along with Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, a seminal essay in Foreign Affairs calling on America to bring about an era of "global benevolent hegemony."

    They predicted that the world would welcome American military dominance as a force for stability and for the promotion of values such as democracy and human rights. In this view, nearly any expression of American military dominance was an act of moral good, whereas the absence of US dominance would invite chaos and, ultimately, threats against the US.

    The neoconservatives' attention would inevitably return, over and over, to Iraq and to the anti-American dictator who had wrongly escaped justice. Iraq was a perfect example of their criticisms of Democrats and Republicans alike, its defiance a seemingly undeniable argument for their worldview.

    Building the case for war

    In 1997, the year after their Foreign Affairs essay, Kagan and Kristol helped found a group called the Project for a New American Century, meant to instill these foreign policy ambitions in a Republican Party that had tilted away from Reagan-style idealism.

    PNAC included in its members Wolfowitz and Perle, as well as other senior Reagan administration officials and neoconservatives such as Elliott Abrams, James Woolsey, and Donald Rumsfeld. From the start, it made Iraq its central issue.

    In January 1998, PNAC published an open letter to the Clinton administration warning that "we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War." It urged a new strategy that "should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power."

    "**** Saddam. We're taking him out."
    Partly this was specific to Iraq. The world was generally pliant to American will in the 1990s, but the defiantly anti-American Iraq stood out as a glaring exception; neoconservatives simply had few other examples to justify their view of a dangerous world that had to be subjugated by American power.

    Perhaps just as importantly, Iraq was seen in Washington as a policy failure for Bill Clinton — tempting many Republicans, whether they were particularly invested in neoconservatism or not, to take hard-line positions from which to attack him.

    But more than that, this was about using Iraq as a proving ground for the neoconservatives' larger and more ideological mission.

    "They saw Iraq as the test case for their ideals about American power and world leadership," Packer writes. "Iraq represented the worst failure of the nineties and the first opportunity of the new American century."

    As it happened, PNAC and its allies had an unprecedented opening to harden their radical proposal into mainstream Washington consensus.

    In 1998 came the Monica Lewinsky scandal, in which congressional Republicans, sensing Clinton's political weakness, sought opportunities to both embarrass him on other fronts and win concessions he might have otherwise resisted. Iraq gave them both: That October, seizing on PNAC's call for regime change, congressional Republicans passed the Iraq Liberation Act, which stated that regime change was US policy.

    Clinton caved to the pressure, signing the Iraq Liberation Act and thus announcing to Saddam Hussein, and to the world, that America was bent on his removal. Saddam, in retaliation, expelled UN weapons inspectors that same day.

    These two acts would prove crucial in laying the groundwork for the US invasion five years later. In Washington, regime change had suddenly and with little thought become a comfortably bipartisan policy position. And the George W. Bush administration would later argue that Saddam had expelled the inspectors not as political retaliation, but rather to restart his 1980s chemical and biological weapons programs.

    In the final year of Clinton's presidency, Kristol and Kagan co-edited a book of essays titled Present Dangers, meant to argue for a new era of neoconservative Republican foreign policy. It included an essay by Richard Perle that argued the US should not just promote an Iraqi uprising but also provide US ground troops to assist them. Perle also urged installing in Saddam's place an exile group known as the Iraqi National Congress, which was headed by Ahmed Chalabi — the very man the US would try to install three years later.

    A few months later, Texas Gov. George W. Bush became president. Moved by neoconservatism's idealistic faith in democracy and perhaps sympathetic to its fixation on Iraq — Saddam had attempted to assassinate Bush's father — Bush filled several top positions with members of PNAC and other neoconservative adherents, including Rumsfeld as defense secretary and Wolfowitz as deputy secretary of defense. Richard Perle chaired the Pentagon's defense policy advisory board.


    The White House/Getty Images
    Vice President Dick Cheney speaks to President Bush by phone from a secure White House room on September 11, 2001, alongside other senior officials.
    What 9/11 really had to do with the Iraq War

    Despite longstanding conspiracy theory to the contrary, it is not the case that Bush came into office secretly plotting to invade Iraq or that he seized on the 9/11 attacks as cynical justification. While there is a line between the attacks and the invasion of Iraq, that line is not as direct as many Americans might think.

    The attacks left Bush, a foreign policy neophyte, adrift. He had little experience with the Middle East or the complex social and political forces that had culminated, seemingly out of nowhere, in the deaths of some 3,000 Americans. He grasped for an answer; the neoconservatives in his administration just happened to have one ready.

    Since long before 9/11, these officials had argued that terrorism like that of al-Qaeda had to be understood as a symptom of the Middle East's real problems as they saw it: an absence of democracy and of American-dominated "benevolent hegemony."

    This worldview did not necessarily require that Saddam Hussein had been behind the 9/11 attacks or that he had sheltered Osama bin Laden. Nonetheless, the neoconservatives, so steeped in abstract ideological convictions that put Saddam at the center of the Middle East's problems, were unable to resist the temptation to see the 9/11 attacks as validating their grand theories about the world.

    And those theories inevitably culminated, as they always had, in the need for America to go to war with Iraq.

    On 9/11 itself, Packer recounts in his book, "Within minutes of fleeing his office at the devastated Pentagon, Wolfowitz told aides that he suspected Iraqi involvement in the attacks."

    On September 12, 2001, as rescue workers still swarmed the downed Twin Towers, Bush asked his counterterrorism team to investigate Iraqi links. "See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way. ... I want to know any shred," he said, according to then-counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke's recollection to Packer.

    On September 15, at a high-level Camp David meeting to discuss the US response to the attacks, Wolfowitz repeatedly raised Saddam Hussein as not just a possible link but the most important target for retaliation.

    On September 17, according to Packer's account, Bush told his war council, "I believe Iraq was involved."

    In subsequent months, the Bush administration would gesture at a case for Iraqi involvement in 9/11, but would ultimately settle on a very different argument that Saddam possessed WMD programs that threatened the US.

    Bush's flexibility in how he justified the war was telling. It was not any particular issue, whether terrorism or WMDs, that prompted the war; rather, it was always about ideological convictions. Those convictions took on a momentum of their own.

    The administration's neoconservatives argued not just for possible links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden, but that al-Qaeda was an outgrowth of the Middle East's larger problems as they had long identified them. Toppling Saddam would not just solve these root problems — it would transform the Middle East for the better, and begin an era of welcomed American dominance over the region.

    These arguments relied increasingly on a small circle of Middle East scholars such as Fouad Ajami, whose 1998 book Dream Palace of the Arabs had rooted the region's problems in a self-perpetuating social and political rot. Only a major jolt could end the cycle and awaken the once-proud Arabs. This jolt, Ajami argued, would be best delivered by an American invasion to topple Saddam and "liberate" Iraqis with democracy — thus surely inspiring a regional awakening.

    By that December, long before the Bush administration would produce any of the so-called smoking guns proving Iraqi WMDs, it had already begun preparing to sell the public on a war with Iraq. David Frum, the Bush-era speechwriter who would later coin the term "axis of evil," described this moment in his memoir, The Right Man:

    "Here's an assignment. Can you sum up in a sentence or two our best case for going after Iraq?"

    It was late December 2001, and Mike Gerson was parceling out the components of the forthcoming State of the Union speech. His request to me could not have been simpler: I was to provide a justification for war.

    Frum clarifies that other speechwriters were working on alternate drafts that were to be less "hawkish"; his assignment, he believes, did not indicate that the administration was yet dead set on war.

    But Frum's anecdote, like so many others from that time, shows the building momentum, within the administration, for war — a momentum, propelled by ideological conviction, that would ultimately overtake reason and critical thinking in the White House.

    In March 2002, Bush dropped into a meeting between National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and three senators to tell them, "**** Saddam. We're taking him out."

    That June, Richard Haass, the State Department director of policy planning, visited Rice's office for their regular meeting. When he raised the State Department's misgivings about the "bureaucratic chatter" of a possible war, Rice cut him off.

    "Save your breath," she told him. "The president has already made up his mind."

    "It was an accretion, a tipping point," Haass told Packer, recounting the incident. "A decision was not made — a decision happened and you can't say when or how."

    How the Bush administration fooled even itself


    Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images
    Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld with President George W. Bush.
    The neoconservative ideological convictions — a preoccupation with Saddam Hussein, a radical ambition to remake the Middle East from within, an almost blind faith in American military power as a force for positive transformation — led them to desire a war with Iraq as the solution to not just terrorism but a litany of problems, and to see validation for that desire even in the obviously flawed intelligence that would be their justification.

    The White House inserted itself directly into an intelligence dissemination and vetting process that is typically handled by the agencies themselves. After 9/11, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney instituted a new system known as "Top Secret Codeword/Threat Matrix," under which they demanded to personally review raw intelligence.

    "The mistake was not to have proper analysis of the intelligence before giving to the president," Roger Cressey, who served in Bush's National Security Council, told Jane Mayer for her book The Dark Side. "There was no filter. Most of it was garbage. None of it had been corroborated or screened. But it went directly to the president and his advisers, who are not intelligence experts. That's when mistakes got made."

    In the months after the attacks, US intelligence agencies came under heavy pressure to investigate the administration's suspicions of links between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, or of ongoing Iraqi WMD programs.

    It does not appear that the administration encouraged them to lie, but rather that deep-rooted biases led top officials to dismiss the mountains of intelligence that undercut their theories and to favor deeply problematic intelligence that supported it.

    In 2001, for example, a man named Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, whom the US had picked up in Afghanistan and then shipped to Egypt to be tortured, claimed that Saddam had provided al-Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training. The Defense Intelligence Agency warned that Libi's information could not be trusted. But Bush treated it as credible, and repeated Libi's claim as established fact in his case for war.

    The US also relied heavily on claims by an Iraqi exile living in Germany named Rafid Ahmed Alwan, code-named "curveball," who claimed to have direct knowledge of secret Iraqi WMD programs. Though both German and UK intelligence said Alwan was unstable and his information unreliable, the US embraced his claims, which provided the basis of much of its case for war.

    Years later, Alwan admitted he had made it all up to help instigate the American invasion of Iraq. But the White House believed him for the simple reason that it badly wanted to.

    Within months, the momentum for war within the administration had overtaken the normal processes of decision-making — and certainly had overtaken the public case for war.

    By all appearances, administration officials believed their allegations of Iraqi WMDs were true and that this was indeed sufficient justification. Why else would the US launch a desperate, high-profile search for WMDs after invading — which only ended up drawing more attention to how false those allegations had been?

    Rather, they had deceived themselves into seeing half-baked intelligence as affirming their desire for war, and then had sold this to the American people as their casus belli, when in fact it was secondary to their more high-minded and ideological mission that would have been too difficult to explain. That, more than overstating intelligence on WMDs, was the really egregious lie.

    The lie bigger than WMDs: claiming the war was because of WMDs

    "We know they have weapons of mass destruction. We know they have active programs. There isn't any debate about it," Rumsfeld said in September 2002.

    "Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons, and is increasing his capabilities to make more. And he is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon," Bush said the next month, warning that Saddam would "threaten America and the world with horrible poisons, and diseases, and gases, and atomic weapons."

    Then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice claimed that Saddam was running a clandestine nuclear program that was only "six months from a crude nuclear device."

    In fact, none of this was true. Iraq had discontinued its chemical and biological weapons programs in the 1980s. A 1998 US-led bombing campaign had destroyed much of the remains.

    But even if Bush's allegations had been true, they would not have accurately described his administration's real reasons for invading Iraq. The neoconservative mission of upending a tyrant and bringing democracy to the Middle East was mentioned only as a secondary benefit, or deployed as a later justification when no WMDs materialized.

    This was, in part, how the Bush administration backed itself into such shoddy intelligence — shutting down Iraqi WMDs was never really the point, so Bush officials had little reason to fully vet the intelligence suggesting those programs were already gone.

    At the same time, in keeping their actual reasons for war from the public, the Bush administration lost the opportunity for those reasons to be openly debated, at which point more grounded Middle East or military scholars might have revealed them as dangerously misguided.

    America needs to finally confron



    Tmethush ti budlla mua qe ke hap nje liber e ske ndjek asnjhere ndonjhere arenen nderkombntare perevec lajmve konvenjonale.
    Ndryshuar për herë të fundit nga HFTengineer : 05-12-2016 më 21:09

  15. #35
    i/e regjistruar Maska e HFTengineer
    Anëtarësuar
    24-04-2016
    Postime
    469

    Për: Gati për luftë”, NATO 300 mijë forca në përballjen me Rusinë

    Amerika per paqe ne irak me cifutet neokosneviv per proxy war per izreline je ndhe emrat dhe cbene:



    Richard Perle

    “American political advisor and lobbyist who worked for the Reagan administration as an assistant Secretary of Defense and worked on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee from 1987 to 2004. He was Chairman of the Board from 2001 to 2003 under the Bush Administration.”

    “He is a member of several conservative think-tanks, such as Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the Hudson Institute, and (as a resident fellow) the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. He is also a Patron of the Henry Jackson Society. “

    “Perle has written extensively on a number of issues; his cited research interests including defense, national security, and the Middle East. Perle had long been an advocate of regime change in Iraq. He also linked Saddam to Osama Bin Laden just a few days after 9/11”

    “Perle chaired a study group that included Douglas Feith and David Wurmser that produced a strategy paper for the incoming Likud Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm””

    “In a New York Times article Perle was criticized for recommending that the Army purchase an armaments system from an Israeli company that a year earlier had paid him $50,000 in consulting fees.”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Perle

    “In 1996, Perle participated in a study group that produced a report for the incoming Likud-led government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel that urged the country to break off then-ongoing peace initiatives and suggested strategies for reshaping the Middle East. Among the group’s arguments was the idea that “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq [was] an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right.”

    http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1315


    Paul Wolfowitz
    “As U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense during the Presidency of George W. Bush, he was “a major architect of President Bush’s Iraq policy and, within the Administration, its most passionate and compelling advocate” (Boyer 1)”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wolfowitz


    Douglas Feith

    “Douglas Feith is a former Pentagon official closely associated with the neoconservative political faction who has been investigated for allegedly distorting prewar intelligence on Iraq. Feith served as the deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, the number three position at the Pentagon, from July 2001 to August 2005.”

    “Feith has been questioned by the FBI in relation to the passing by one of his employees of confidential Pentagon documents to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which in turn passed them to the Israeli Embassy. The Senate Intelligence Committee is also investigating Feith.”

    “There seems little doubt that he operated in the Pentagon in such a way as to produce false and misleading ‘intelligence,’ that he created an entirely false impression of Iraqi weapons capabilities and ties to al-Qaida, and that he is among the chief facilitators of the U.S. war in Iraq. Feith is clearly resigning ahead of the possible breaking of major scandals concerning his tenure at the Department of Defense, which is among the more disgraceful cases of the misleading of the American people in American history.”

    “Although Feith was not formally charged in connection to his work at the Pentagon, his work has been repeatedly investigated, and official reports have linked him to efforts to push faulty evidence to justify the war. One investigation, by the Department of Defense’s inspector general (IG), was set up to assess whether the Office of Special Plans (OSP), a specialized outfit set up by Feith within the Pentagon to scrutinize intelligence on Iraq, deliberately skewed information about the regime of Saddam Hussein (New York Times, May 25, 2006).”

    “Feith also served on the board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a think tank that promotes a military and strategic alliance between the United States and Israel. [8]”

    “Feith favors US support for Israel and has promoted US-Israeli cooperation. He also favors stronger US-Turkish cooperation, and increased military ties between Turkey and Israel. Both Feith and his father have been honored by the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), a conservative organization that often makes common cause on foreign policy issues with conservative Christian organizations."

    “His father, Dalck, was a member of the Betar, a Revisionist Zionist youth organization”

    http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1146

    “The Betar Movement (בית"ר, also spelled Beitar) is a Revisionist Zionist youth movement founded in 1923 in Riga, Latvia, by Ze'ev Jabotinsky. Betar members played important roles in the fight against the British during the Mandate, and in the creation of Israel. It has been traditionally linked to the original Herut and then Likud Israeli political parties.”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betar


    Michael Ledeen

    “Ledeen was a founding member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and he served on the JINSA Board of Advisors. In 2003, the Washington Post alleged that he was consulted by Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s closest advisor, as his main international affairs adviser.”

    “Michael Ledeen had been accused of being involved in the forgery which claimed that Saddam Hussein had bought yellowcake in Niger.”

    “Writing in The Nation, a left-wing magazine, Jack Huberman, who describes Ledeen as “the most influential and unabashed warmonger of our time”, attributes these quotes to Ledeen:[19]

    * “the level of casualties (in Iraq) is secondary”
    * “we are a warlike people (Americans)...we love war”
    * “Change - above all violent change - is the essence of human history”
    * “the only way to achieve peace is through total war”
    * “The purpose of total war is to permanently force your will onto another people”
    * “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ledeen

    <>

    Scooter Libby

    “an American former corporate lawyer, policy advisor, and novelist who served as Assistant to the President of the United States, George W. Bush, Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney, and Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs from 2001 to 2005.”

    “Libby was active in the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee of the Pentagon when it was chaired by Richard Perle during the early years of the George W. Bush administration (2001-2003).[44]”

    “British Secretary of State for Justice Jack Straw said of Libby: “It’s a toss-up whether [he] is working for the Israelis or the Americans on any given day.”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooter_Libby


    Charles Krauthammer

    “Neoconservative columnist and commentator. Krauthammer appears regularly as a guest commentator on Fox News. His print work appears in the Washington Post, Time magazine and The Weekly Standard.”

    “Krauthammer asserted that Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction was certain”

    “Krauthammer guaranteed that the weapons would eventually be discovered”

    “Krauthammer has been a defender of the Likud party in Israel”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Krauthammer


    Stephen Bryen

    “Bryen is also closely connected to various high-profile neoconservatives like Richard Perle, under whom Bryen served when Perle was President Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense, and has supported the work of a number of hardline pro-Israel groups like the Center for Security Policy (CSP) and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA).”

    “In the mid-1970s, Bryen and a group of other mainly neoconservative figures, including Michael Ledeen, helped establish JINSA as an important Washington-based think tank specializing in fostering close ties between the U.S. and Israeli militaries”

    “Bryen had a role in choosing not only what U.S. weaponry Israel would be allowed to purchase with those funds, but also what sensitive U.S. military technology would be made available to Israel for use in its own burgeoning arms industry.”

    “Some observers have accused Bryen of using his insider connections in Washington to the benefit of Israel.”

    “In a January 2002 article for National Review Online, Bryen pushed the erroneous thesis that Iraq had maintained a well-developed biological weapons program since the first Gulf War in 1991, making it the “leading threat” to “global survival.””

    “Even prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Bryen was part of a core group of foreign policy hardliners and neoconservatives who pushed for overthrowing Saddam Hussein”

    http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1063


    David Frum

    “David J. Frum (born 1960) is a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush”

    “Frum is widely cited as having authored the phrase “axis of evil,” “

    “Frum’s latest book, An End to Evil, was co-written with Richard Perle. It provided a defense of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and advocated regime change in Iran and Syria”

    “Frum writes a weekly column for Canada’s National Post newspaper and is a commentator for American Public Radio’s “Marketplace.” His writings appear frequently in the New York Times, Italy’s Il Foglio, and the Daily Telegraph. He also writes a blog, David Frum’s Diary at the National Review Online Web site.”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frum


    Robert Kagan

    “American neoconservative scholar and political commentator.”

    “Kagan worked at the State Department Bureau of Inter-American Affairs (1985-1988) and was a speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Shultz (1984-1985). Prior to that, he was foreign policy advisor to New York Representative and future Republican vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp”

    “Kagan, who has written for The New Republic, Policy Review, the Washington Post (monthly), and the Weekly Standard, now lives in Brussels, Belgium, with his family.”

    “He is a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kagan


    David Wurmser

    “David Wurmser is a Swiss-American dual citizen and the Middle East Adviser to US Vice President Dick Cheney. Wurmser, a neoconservative, previously served as special assistant to John R. Bolton at the State Department and was a former research fellow on the Middle East at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).”

    “In 2000, Wurmser helped draft a document entitled “Ending Syria’s Occupation of Lebanon: the US Role?”, which called for a confrontation with the regime in Damascus. The document said that Syria was developing “weapons of mass destruction”.[2]”

    “After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith appointed Wurmser and veteran defense analyst Michael Maloof as a secret two-man Pentagon intelligence unit. One of their products, days after the attacks, was a memo that suggested “hitting targets outside the Middle East in the initial offensive” or a “non-Al Qaeda target like Iraq.” “

    “On September 4, 2004, the Washington Post reported that FBI counterintelligence investigators had questioned Wurmser, along with Feith, Harold Rhode, and Paul Wolfowitz about the passing of classified information to Ahmad Chalabi and/or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. [4]”

    Wurmser’s wife, Dr. Meyrav Wurmser, co-founded the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wurmser


    Dov Zakheim

    “During the 2000 U.S. Presidential election campaign, Zakheim served as a foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush “

    “appointed to be Undersecretary of Defense and Comptroller from 2001 to 2004 under the George W. Bush administration, and served in this capacity until April 2004. During his term as Comptroller, he was tasked to help track down the Pentagon’s 2.6 trillion dollars ($2,600,000,000,000) worth of unaccounted transactions”

    “As an Orthodox Jew, he gained notoriety for his involvement in ending the Israeli fighter program, the IAI Lavi. He argued that Israeli and U.S. interests would be best served by having Israel purchase F-16 fighters, rather than investing in an entirely new aircraft.”

    “He is currently a Vice President of Booz Allen Hamilton.”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dov_Zakheim

    ”Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc., referred to as Booz Allen is one of the oldest strategy consulting firms in the world.[1]”
    “the firm generated annual total sales of over $4 billion in FY2007.[8]”

    “In 2006 at the request of the Article 29 Working Group, an advisory group to the European Commission (EC), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Privacy International (PI) investigated the U.S. government’s SWIFT surveillance program and Booz Allen’s role therein. The ACLU and PI filed a memo at the end of their investigation which called into question the ethics and legality of a government contractor (in this case Booz Allen) acting as auditors of a government program, when that contractor is heavily involved with those same agencies on other contracts. The basic statement was that a conflict of interest may exist. Beyond that, the implication was also made that Booz Allen may be complicit in a program (electronic surveillance of SWIFT) that may be deemed illegal by the EC.”

    “A June 28, 2007 Washington Post article [13] related how a U.S. Department of Homeland Security contract with Booz Allen increased from $2 million to more than $70 million through two no-bid contracts, one occurring after the DHS’s legal office had advised DHS not to continue the contract until after a review.”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booz_Allen_Hamilton


    Henry Kissenger

    “In 2002, President George W. Bush appointed Kissinger to chair a committee to investigate the events of the September 11 attacks. “

    “In 2006, it was reported in the book State of Denial by Bob Woodward that Kissinger was meeting regularly with President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to offer advice on the War in Iraq.[38] Kissinger confirmed in recorded interviews with Woodward”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_kissinger


    Norman Podhoretz

    “He asserts that the War on Terror is a war against Islamofascism, and constitutes World War IV (World War III having been the Cold War), and advocates the bombing of Iran to pre-empt their acquisition of nuclear weapons.”

    “Project for the New American Century, PNAC, original signer”

    “”Podhoretz is the father of John Podhoretz, a columnist for the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, who also acts as a ubiquitous booster of the hawks”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Podhoretz


    John Podhoretz

    “Podhoretz has been one of the most steadfast supporters of U.S. president George W. Bush, and even wrote a book extolling Bush as “the first great leader of the 21st century”.”

    “Podhoretz is emphatic in his defense of Israel”

    “However, Podhoretz was critical of the tactics used by Israel’s leadership in the recent Lebanon conflict, and argued that the Olmert government should have been more forceful in its efforts to weaken Hezbollah as a political and military force.”

    “Podhoretz has a regular column at the New York Post, has been a political commentator on Fox News, and regularly appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources. He has also worked at Time, the Washington Times, Insight, and U.S. News & World Report. Podhoretz is a contributor to The Corner, a group blog run by National Review.”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Podhoretz


    Elliot Abrams

    “American lawyer who has served in foreign policy positions for two Republican U.S. Presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.”

    “During Bush’s first term in office, he was appointed the post of Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs. At the start of Bush’s second term, Abrams was promoted to be his Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy, responsible for advancing Bush’s strategy of advancing democracy abroad. Although Abrams is considered a leading neoconservative”

    “He was one of the signatories of the 26 January 1998 PNAC letter sent to President Bill Clinton which called for regime-change in Iraq.[17]”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Abrams


    Frederick Kagan

    “Frederick Kagan and his father Donald Kagan, who is a professor at Yale and a fellow at the Hudson Institute, together authored While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today (2000). The book argued in favor of massive military spending and warned of future threats, including from a potential revival of Iraq’s WMD program.[1] Frederick along with his brother Robert Kagan, who is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group, and their father Donald are all signatories to the neoconservative Project for the New American Century manifesto titled Rebuilding America’s Defenses (2000)”

    “Kagan was said to have won-over the ear of President George W. Bush,[3] strongly influencing his subsequent “surge” plan for changing the course of the Iraq War”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Kagan


    Donald Kagan
    ================================================== ==========================================

    “became one of the original signers to the 1997 Statement of Principles by the neoconservative “think tank,” Project for the New American Century”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Kagan



    Alan Dershowtiz

    He is “”an American political figure and criminal law professor at Harvard Law School”

    “Dershowitz comments regularly on issues related to Judaism, Israel, civil liberties, the war on terror, and the First Amendment, and appears frequently in the mainstream media as a guest commentator.””

    “Dershowitz published an essay in the San Francisco Chronicle entitled “Want to Torture? Get a Warrant,” in which he advocates the issuance of warrants permitting the torture of terrorism suspects if there were an “absolute need to obtain immediate information in order to save lives”

    “James Bamford, in his column for The Washington Post of September 8, 2002, reviews Dershowitz’s “idea of torture” and describes “[o]ne form of torture recommended by Dershowitz—‘the sterilized needle being shoved under the fingernails’” as “chillingly Nazi-like.””

    “In his book Beyond Chutzpah, Norman Finkelstein” [who is Jewish] “comments: "It is hard to make out any difference between the policy Dershowitz advocates and the Nazi destruction of Lidice, for which he expresses abhorrence-except that Jews, not Germans, would be implementing it."[33]”

    “His parents, Harry and Claire, were both devout Orthodox Jews”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Dershowitz


    Daniel Pipes

    “American historian and counter-terrorism analyst who specializes in the Middle East.”

    “regular columnist for the New York Sun and The Jerusalem Post. He contributes regularly to David Horowitz’s online publication FrontPage Magazine, and he has had his work published by many newspapers across North America, including the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal.[citation needed] He is frequently invited to discuss the Middle East on American network television, as well as by universities and think tanks, has appeared on the BBC and Al Jazeera”

    “Pipes and the organization were accused of attacking academic freedom in 2002 by publishing a list of academics critical of Israel and U.S. foreign policy”

    “Pipes has served in various capacities at the Departments of State and Defense, while his father served on the National Security Council, and he has testified to the United States Congress”
    “Pipes is an outspoken Zionist.”

    “In 1987, Pipes encouraged the United States to provide Saddam Hussein with upgraded weapons and intelligence,[30] ostensibly to counterbalance Iran’s successes in the Iran-Iraq War”

    “Pipes was a strong backer of the Iraq War, saying that Saddam Hussein posed an “imminent threat” to the United States.[2] In a New York Post article published April 8, 2003, Pipes expressed his opposition to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s concerned prediction that “[the] war [in Iraq] will have horrible consequences...Terrorism will be aggravated...Terrorist organizations will be united...Everything will be insecure.” Though this concern was echoed by various other politicians and academics cited by Pipes in his article,[18] Pipes argued that “the precise opposite is more likely to happen: The war in Iraq will lead to a reduction in terrorism.””

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Pipes



    Eliot Cohen

    “Cohen is the Director of the Strategic Studies department at SAIS and has specialized in strategic studies, the Middle East, Persian Gulf, Iraq, arms control, and NATO. He is a member of the Project for the New American Century and was called “the most influential neoconservative in academe” by energy economist Ahmad Faruqui.[1] He is currently serving as Counselor to the U.S. State Department.”

    “Cohen was one of the first neoconservatives to publicly advocate war against Iran and Iraq”
    Quote by Cohen: “We know that he [Saddam Hussain] supports terror. There’s very solid evidence that the Iraqis were behind an attempt to assassinate President Bush’s father. And we—by the way, we do know that there is a connection with the 9/11 terrorists.”

    “As a member of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee Cohen had also been engaged in meetings involving US President George Bush. During these meetings Cohen provided advice on strategy in the Iraq conflict”

    “On 2 March 2007 it was reported by the Washington Post that Cohen was to be appointed as Condoleezza Rice’s “counselor” at the United States Department of State.”

    “Regarding the “academic paper titled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. The paper criticizes the Israel lobby for influencing U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East away from U.S. interests and towards Israel’s interests. Eliot Cohen, who is Jewish, wrote in a prominent op-ed piece in The Washington Post that the academic working paper bears all the traditional hallmarks of anti-Semitism”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Cohen


    Bill Kristol

    “He is the son of Irving Kristol, one of the founders of the neoconservative movement”

    “Kristol was a strong advocate of the Iraq war”

    “Most recently he has been a vocal supporter of the Israeli attack on Lebanon, stating that the war is “our war too,” referring to the United States. He continues to back the Iraq war, and favors a war with Iran”

    “Kristol caused controversy by praising President George W. Bush’s second inaugural address without disclosing his role as a consultant to the writing of the speech.”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kristol


    Irving Kristol

    “considered the founder of American neoconservatism”

    “Kristol is the founder of the politics and culture journal The Public Interest and the foreign affairs journal The National Interest.”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Kristol


    Max Boot

    “He has been a prominent advocate for neoconservative foreign policy, once describing his own position as support for the use of “American might to promote American ideals” throughout the world.[1]”

    “He is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a regular contributor to other publications including the Financial Times and The New York Times. “

    “He is also a consultant to the U.S. military and a regular lecturer at U.S. military institutions such as the Army War College and the Command and General Staff College. He has previously worked for The Wall Street Journal and The Christian Science Monitor”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Boot


    James Schlesinger

    “James Rodney Schlesinger (born February 15, 1929) was United States Secretary of Defense from 1973 to 1975 under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. He became America's first Secretary of Energy under Jimmy Carter.”

    “Schlesinger was born in New York City to Rae, a Russian Jewish immigrant, and Julius Schlesinger, an Austrian Jew.”

    “On February 2, 1973 he became Director of Central Intelligence, after Richard Helms”

    “Thereafter he resumed his writing and speaking career and was employed as a senior adviser to Lehman Brothers, Kuhn Loeb Inc., of New York City. On June 11, 2002 he was appointed by U.S. President George W. Bush to the Homeland Security Advisory Council. He also serves as a consultant to the United States Department of Defense, and is a member of the Defense Policy Board. On January 5, 2006, he participated in a meeting at the White House of former Secretaries of Defense and State to discuss United States foreign policy with Bush administration officials. On January 31, 2006 he was appointed by the Secretary of State to be a member of the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board. On May 2, 2006, he was named to be a co-chairman of a Defense Science Board study on DOD Energy Strategy.”


    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Schlesinger


    Marc Grossman

    “Marc Grossman was the United States Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs
    from 2001 to 2005.”

    “Before assuming these duties, Grossman served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs.”
    “He was Director General of the Foreign Service and Director of Human Resources, from June 2000 to February 2001, and Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, from August 1997 to May 2000. From November 1994 to June 1997, he served as U.S. Ambassador to Turkey. Prior to this, from January 1993 to September 1994, he was Special Assistant to the Secretary of State and Executive Secretary of the Department of State.

    Before assuming these duties, Grossman served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs. He was Executive Assistant to Deputy Secretary of State John C. Whitehead from September 1986 to January 1989.“

    “he retired from the State Department as the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Ambassador Grossman served as the Department’s third-ranking official, supporting U.S. diplomacy worldwide. Following the September 11th attacks, he helped marshal international diplomatic support for the Global war on Terrorism and for the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.”


    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Grossman

    ”Religion: Jewish”

  16. #36
    i/e regjistruar Maska e HFTengineer
    Anëtarësuar
    24-04-2016
    Postime
    469

    Për: Gati për luftë”, NATO 300 mijë forca në përballjen me Rusinë

    E njef kush ehste judith miller nje nga neokonsevativat ne new york time ti i zgjuteo dhe ca bere bashke me cnn dhan lajme te rreme mbi armet ne iraq :


    Pulitzer Prize winner Judith Miller’s series of exclusives about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—courtesy of the now-notorious Ahmad Chalabi—helped the New York Times keep up with the competition and the Bush administration bolster the case for war. How the very same talents that caused her to get the story also caused her to get it wrong.

    By Franklin Foer


    Pulitzer Prize winner Judith Miller’s series of exclusives about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—courtesy of the now-notorious Ahmad Chalabi—helped the New York Times keep up with the competition and the Bush administration bolster the case for war. How the very same talents that caused her to get the story also caused her to get it wrong.

    By Franklin Foer

    Judith Miller discusses post-Saddam Iraq on The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.
    (Photo: The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer)
    For critics of the Iraq war, the downfall of Ahmad Chalabi occasioned a hearty, unapologetic outpouring of Schadenfreude—a loud cheer for a well-deserved knee to the administration’s gut. In fact, it was possible to detect a bit of this spirit on the front page of the New York Times. On May 21, the editors arrayed contrasting images of the banker turned freedom fighter turned putative Iranian spy. Here he is smirking behind Laura Bush in the House of Representatives gallery as the president delivers his State of the Union address. There he is looking bleary and sweaty, after Iraqi police stormed his home and office in the middle of the night. An analysis by David Sanger went so far as to name names of individuals who had associated themselves with the discredited leader of the Iraqi National Congress. The list, he wrote, included “many of the men who came to dominate the top ranks of the Bush administration . . . Donald H. Rumsfeld, Paul D. Wolfowitz, Douglas J. Feith, Richard L. Armitage, Elliott Abrams and Zalmay M. Khalilzad, among others.”

    The phrase “among others” is a highly evocative one. Because that list of credulous Chalabi allies could include the New York Times’ own reporter, Judith Miller. During the winter of 2001 and throughout 2002, Miller produced a series of stunning stories about Saddam Hussein’s ambition and capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, based largely on information provided by Chalabi and his allies—almost all of which have turned out to be stunningly inaccurate.

    For the past year, the Times has done much to correct that coverage, publishing a series of stories calling Chalabi’s credibility into question. But never once in the course of its coverage—or in any public comments from its editors—did the Times acknowledge Chalabi’s central role in some of its biggest scoops, scoops that not only garnered attention but that the administration specifically cited to buttress its case for war.

    The longer the Times remained silent on Chalabi’s importance to Judith Miller’s reporting, the louder critics howled. In February, in the New York Review of Books, Michael Massing held up Miller as evidence of the press’s “submissiveness” in covering the war. For more than a year, Slate’s Jack Shafer has demanded the paper come clean.

    But finally, with Chalabi’s fall from grace so complete—the Pentagon has cut off his funding, troops smashed his portrait in raids of the INC office—the Times’ refusal to concede its own complicity became untenable. Last week, on page A10, the paper published a note on its coverage, drafted by executive editor Bill Keller himself. The paper singled out pieces that relied on “information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors, and exiles bent on ‘regime change.’ ” The note named Ahmad Chalabi as a central player in this group.

    This time, however, the omission of Judith Miller’s name was conspicuous. “Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated.”

    “It was precisely her unpleasant aggressiveness that helped force the story—the marriage of WMD and global jihadists—closer to the top of the agenda.”
    The editor’s note was correct: The Judy Miller problem is complicated. That is, the very qualities that endeared Miller to her editors at the New York Times—her ambition, her aggressiveness, her cultivation of sources by any means necessary, her hunger to be first—were the same ones that allowed her to get the WMD story so wrong.

    Miller is a star, a diva. She wrote big stories, won big prizes. Long before her WMD articles ran, Miller had become a newsroom legend—and for reasons that had little to do with the stories that appeared beneath her byline. With her seemingly bottomless ambition—a pair of big feet that would stomp on colleagues in her way and even crunch a few bystanders—she cut a larger-than-life figure that lent itself to Paul Bunyan–esque retellings. Most of these stories aren’t kind. Of course, nobody said journalism was a country club. And her personality was immaterial while she was succeeding, winning a Pulitzer, warning the world about terrorism, bio-weapons, and Iraq’s war machine. But now, who she is, and why she prospered, makes for a revealing cautionary tale about the culture of American journalism.

    On a summer afternoon in the early eighties, Judy Miller invited her exercise-averse boyfriend Richard Burt, then the Times’ defense reporter, to watch her swim laps in the Washington Hilton pool. Afterward, lounging in the sun, Miller veered into one of her favorite lines of conversation: Does chemical or nuclear warfare inflict the most damage? Burt, who would go on to become an assistant secretary of State in the Reagan administration, has a serious cast of mind. But even he was taken aback by Miller’s dark thoughts. “I remember being struck that there are not many people sitting around on a beautiful day thinking about weapons of mass destruction,” he says.

    Miller’s dramatic way of looking at the world may have something to do with her family’s show-business background. During the forties and fifties, her father, Bill Miller, ran the Riviera nightclub in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Famed for its retractable roof, the Riviera staged shows by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Tito Puente. When the state highway commission ordered the Riviera condemned in 1953, Miller made his way to Vegas, proving his impresario bona fides by reviving the careers of Elvis Presley and Marlene Dietrich.

    Judy Miller arrived in the Times’ Washington bureau in 1977, as part of a new breed of hungry young hires, prodded in part by the sting of losing the Watergate story to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post. “She was unlike the other guys there. That’s why they brought her to the paper,” says Steven Rattner, another old boyfriend, who eventually left his Times gig to become an investment banker.

    Installed amid colleagues—they were almost all men—who’d spent decades working their way up the paper’s food chain, Miller stood out immediately for her sharp elbows. While the culture of the paper assiduously practices omertà—what happens in the newsroom stays in the newsroom—Miller is cause for reporters to break the code of silence. An unusual number of her co-workers have gone out of their way to separate themselves and their paper from Miller. Few are brave enough to attach their names to the stories, but they all sound a similar refrain. “She’s a shit to the people she works with,” says one. “When I see her coming, my instinct is to go the other way,” says another. They recite her foibles and peccadilloes, from getting temporarily banned by the Times’ D.C. car service for her rudeness to throwing a fit over rearranged items on her desk. Defenders are few and far between. And even the staunchest ones often concede her faults. Bill Keller told me in an e-mail, “She has sharp elbows. She is possessive of her sources, and passionate about her stories, and a little obsessive. If you interview people who have worked with Sy Hersh, I’ll bet you’ll find some of the same complaints.”




    Miller’s brief when she arrived at the paper was primarily to cover the Securities and Exchange Commission. But that wasn’t her true interest. At Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, studying for a master’s in public affairs, she traveled to Jerusalem in 1971 to research a paper. “I became fascinated with the Israeli and the Palestinian dispute, and spent the rest of the summer traveling for the first time to Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon,” Miller told me in an e-mail. (Miller responded by e-mail to some questions and ignored others.) “By the end of the summer, I was hooked.” As a correspondent for The Progressive and National Public Radio, she turned her academic interest into a professional one, traveling to the region and cultivating a network of highly placed sources. Nina Totenberg, a colleague from NPR, recalls a party in the mid-seventies at which Jordan’s King Hussein caught a glimpse of Miller across the room and howled, “Juuuuddddy!”

    “Kiiiinnnggg,” she responded.

    In 1983, the Times put her Middle East experience to use by installing her as its Cairo bureau chief, allowing her to range from Tripoli to Damascus. Paradoxically, powerful Middle Eastern men, with their fervent sexism, actually represented an opportunity for female reporters. Viewing the women with utter condescension, these monarchs and dictators had no fear of granting them extraordinary access. They would pontificate without worries of repercussions. Miller had ready access to many Mideast potentates. As she shuttled between meetings with Hussein, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and Palestinian Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat in 1984, her colleagues joked about the “Miller Plan” for peace.

    Miller also racked up the sort of adventure tales that correspondents love to dispense after a dram or two of whiskey. She witnessed a hanging in Sudan, flew across Afghanistan in a rickety Northern Alliance helicopter held together in places by duct tape. “Judy is a smart, relentless, incredibly well-sourced, and fearless reporter,” says Keller. “It’s a little galling to watch her pursued by some of these armchair media ethicists who have never ventured into a war zone or earned the right to carry Judy’s laptop.”

    From her first day at the Times, Miller’s life and work have been hard to separate, which for a reporter is both a strength and a weakness. “She’s a passionate person—she gets caught up in her sources passionately,” one of her Times colleagues told me. Friends from her earliest days in Washington noted that she didn’t surround herself with people her own age. She sought out the best and brightest at the city’s highest levels, dating Larry Sterne, the Washington Post’s foreign editor, and hanging out with the defense gurus Richard Perle and Walter Slocum. “These people were powerful. But they were also interesting, and Judy liked talking to them. She is curious and enthusiastic,” says one friend from this period.

    And she got caught up in her coverage of the Middle East. It was a passion she acknowledged in the introduction to her 1996 book on Islam, God Has Ninety-Nine Names: “While I have tried to keep an open mind about traditions and cultures that differ from my own, I make no apology for the fact that as a Western woman and an American, I believe firmly in the inherent dignity of the individual and the value of human rights and legal equality for all. In this commitment, I, too, am unapologetically militant.”

    King Hussein caught a glimpse of Miller across the room and howled, “Juuuuddddy.” “Kiiiinnnggg,” she responded.
    By the late nineties, she was focused largely on the nexus between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Her dispatches from the region frequently contained nightmare scenarios. One piece, co-written with William Broad, warned that “a pilotless plane spraying 200 pounds of anthrax near a large city might kill up to a million people—if the winds were right, if no rain fell, if the nozzles did not get clogged, if the particles were the right size, if the population had no vaccinations, and so on.” It might have seemed like a risk too far-fetched to mention, but she felt compelled to mention it. The country at the time seemed to be enjoying the equivalent of that sunny day at the Hilton. The economy was booming, and the biggest problem seemed to be managing prosperity—and a president’s personal failings. “Remember, everyone was obsessed with the White House sex story,” says New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg, who was invited by the paper to join Miller in an investigation unit to examine Al Qaeda. Goldberg found her an impossibly difficult colleague. But he also realized her value. “She happened to be prescient about the rise of the global jihad. And it was her unpleasant hyper-aggressiveness that enabled her to help force a very important story—the possibility of a marriage between WMD proliferators and global jihadists—closer to the top of the agenda.”

    Before September 11, Miller, with her anxieties about anthrax attacks, could seem like Chicken Little; afterward, she seemed more liked Cassandra, the only one who’d been right. And this fact gave her tremendous power at the paper. Eight months before the attacks, she published a piece documenting Al Qaeda’s WMD ambitions—part of a series that later earned her (along with several colleagues) a Pulitzer. Germs, a book about bioterrorism co-written with two Times colleagues, appeared less than a month after the attacks and soon hit the best-seller list. She began making regular appearances on CNN and PBS, becoming a public face of the paper—a celebrity that grimly solidified when she received a hoax letter at her desk containing a white, powdery substance resembling anthrax.

    What’s more, she had spent several decades acquiring access to Washington’s Middle East experts, some of whom suddenly wielded tremendous influence in the Bush administration. Miller’s many doubters at the Times were effectively silenced. She had emerged as one of the paper’s biggest stars, with the kind of “competitive metabolism” that new editor Howell Raines—he’d taken over from Joseph Lelyveld the week before 9/11—made into a crusade. According to a friend of Raines’s, as well as one of Miller’s colleagues at the paper, the editor pulled her aside after the attacks. “Go win a Pulitzer,” he told her.

    For the next two years, she supplied the paper with a string of grim exclusives. There was the defector who described Saddam Hussein’s recent renovation of storage facilities for nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. There was her report that a Russian virologist might have handed the regime a particularly virulent strain of smallpox. To protect themselves against VX and sarin, she further reported, the Iraqis had greatly increased the importation of an antidote to these agents. And, most memorably, she co-wrote a piece in which administration officials suggested that Iraq had attempted to import aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons. Vice-President Dick Cheney trumpeted the story on Meet the Press, closing the circle. Of course, each of the stories contained important caveats. But together they painted a horrifying picture. There was just one problem with them: The vast majority of these blockbusters turned out to be wrong.

    Long before Miller’s current difficulties, she was known at the paper for a different sin: rudeness, amplified by a legendary temper. Seth Faison, a foreign correspondent who has punched his ticket with the Times in China, tells the following story: In 1993, Miller had been billeted over to the Metro desk from her day job as a staff writer at the Times Magazine to help report on the World Trade Center bombing. Faison, a young Metro reporter, had left the office for jury duty. During his absence, Miller ensconced herself at his desk. “I had been at the Times for less than two years, and I’m not a very assertive person. And so I just said, ‘Judy, could I sit here?’ She said, ‘You have to go someplace else.’ ”

    When Faison went to his editors, they did nothing to help him. “They held up their hands palm up, like, ‘I’m not going to touch this one.’ They didn’t want the wrath of Judy Miller.” And so for a week, without ever acknowledging Faison’s refugee status, Miller occupied his territory.

    The epicenter of Miller-bashing is the Washington bureau. The phenomenon has a long history. During her tumultuous time as deputy bureau chief in the late eighties, she proposed reassigning many reporters out, to other bureaus and lesser posts. Adam Clymer, who served as the paper’s political editor, recalls, “She ran the bureau day to day, and that regime was probably the unhappiest in my experience.”

    According to Clymer, she would call reporters and editors in the middle of the night to complain about stories. She found an unusual way to pass on others’ complaints as well. To listen to a daily feed from the afternoon story meeting in New York, she moved a squawk box onto her desk in the newsroom, where everyone else in the bureau could hear the feed, too. They could eavesdrop on top editors ripping into colleagues’ stories with vicious remarks obviously not intended for wide distribution.

    At a paper that prides itself on at least a veneer of collegiality, Miller’s reporting tactics often left jaws agape. According to two Times veterans, reporters at the Pentagon and on other beats have frequently found themselves calling their sources, only to be told, “I’ve already talked to Judy Miller.”

    They charge her with forcing her bylines onto stories, staunchly arguing for the addition of her name after adding mere dribs and drabs of information. “She’s not afraid to get her byline by bigfooting. In fact, that’s how she gets many of them,” charges one of her colleagues.

    But when there is trouble, it appears she’s more than happy to pass around the responsibility. One incident that still rankles happened last April, when Miller co-bylined a story with Douglas Jehl on the WMD search that included a quote from Amy Smithson, an analyst formerly at the Henry L. Stimson Center. A day after it appeared, the Times learned that the quote was deeply problematic. To begin with, it had been supplied to Miller in an e-mail that began, “Briefly and on background”—a condition that Miller had flatly broken by naming her source. Miller committed a further offense by paraphrasing the quote and distorting Smithson’s analysis. One person who viewed the e-mail says that it attributed views to Smithson that she clearly didn’t hold. An embarrassing correction ensued. And while the offense had been entirely Miller’s, there was nothing in the correction indicating Jehl’s innocence.

    The bad feelings from these incidents have festered over time, and as problems have come to light with Miller’s reporting, her critics at the paper have eagerly piled on. Over the course of the past six months, Washington reporters have complained vociferously about Miller. They have been especially angry that Miller appears on Larry King Live and Paula Zahn Now to discuss Iraqi WMD. “There’s anger and embarrassment among the staff that Judy is still the voice of the Times on the subject,” says one reporter. In addition, some of these reporters have frankly told their editors that they will never share a byline with her. All this pressure has succeeded in forcing official reforms. The paper’s current policy is that any time Miller visits Washington, her editor Matthew Purdy must provide bureau chief Philip Taubman and his deputies with advance notice and explain her purpose for visiting. In January, the bureau officially deprived Miller of her desk. Although this was ostensibly done to make space, according to denizens of the bureau it had an intentional symbolic value, too. “It gave the bureau a way to move her out without saying it was moving her out,” says a reporter.

    But she’s less an anomaly in the newsroom than a caricature of it. She’s the toughest of infighters. But “blaming her for that,” Richard Burt told me, “would be like blaming a fish for swimming; it was necessary for survival in that place.”

    And also, no one has ever questioned her work ethic—she is indefatigable. “Judy Miller is a tireless and absolutely relentless reporter,” managing editor Jill Abramson told me. “In the Washington bureau, she was often the last reporter still working, sometimes making phone calls until the wee morning hours.”

    According to her colleagues, she has a long history of stumbling off professional peaks only to scale them again. Her stewardship of the Washington bureau was followed by a move to New York to work as deputy media editor. After her coverage of the Gulf War, she took a turn reporting on philanthropy. But with each dip, ever-growing reserves of gumption ultimately allowed her to rehabilitate herself. One of Miller’s old Washington sources and friends told me that years of competition had “really thickened her skin. The Times really coarsened her.”

    On the day the Times’ editor’s note ran, she wasn’t hiding with a feather pillow over her face. She was covering a microbiology conference in New Orleans. And just as the paper had explained Miller’s overreliance on Chalabi, she sent me an e-mail implying that she hadn’t had a close relationship with the INC leader: “I co-wrote the toughest profile of him that our paper published.”

    If Miller is an extreme example of the Times’ ultracompetitive mind-set, she is also an example of an inherent problem of journalism: its reliance on sources. As a Middle East hand, and Saddam Hussein’s biographer, Miller spent the nineties paying careful attention to Iraq. But the country posed a major journalistic challenge: Saddam hardly ever granted visas to Western journalists. When he did, the secret police and Ministry of Information carefully restricted their movements, ensuring that they didn’t return home with telling stories. And the CIA hadn’t done any better infiltrating the Baathists. “For the CIA and every other Western intelligence service, Iraq was a black hole, a denied area, almost impossible to get good intelligence out of,” says former agency operative Bob Baer.

    There was really only one source that claimed to have secret contacts within the country: the Iraqi National Congress. The INC had begun as an umbrella organization, cobbled together by the CIA to corral a disparate band of anti-Saddam forces into an effective opposition. At the start, Chalabi had been a functionary in this group, arranging logistics for Iraqi politicians visiting officials in Washington. But with his charming persona, he quickly became the group’s public face—an ascent that alienated many of the groups he claimed to represent. He had always known how to handle the Western press. As a banker in Amman, he had been a source of gossip about intrigue in King Hussein’s palace. Reporters—including Judy Miller—turned to him for dirt.

    During the late nineties, Chalabi became one of the most contentious figures in Washington, inspiring as much partisan adoration as hatred. For a journalist covering Iraq, however, Chalabi represented an enormous temptation. Sure, there were doubts. But these could always be chalked up to the CIA’s bureaucratic impulse to blame Chalabi for botching a 1996 coup, even though it hardly evinced competence itself. Besides, his defectors had so much splashy information. Plenty of journalists—including the Times’ James Risen, Lowell Bergman, and Chris Hedges—couldn’t resist working with INC-associated defectors. But none of them went so far as Miller in cultivating Chalabi.

    There’s an important difference in reportorial style between Miller and her colleagues. Risen and Bergman are diggers, excavating documents and sources hidden deep in the bureaucracy. Miller, on the other hand, relies on her well-placed, carefully tended-to connections to nab her stories. In February, on the public-radio show “The Connection,” she said, “My job was not to collect information and analyze it independently as an intelligence agency; my job was to tell readers of the New York Times, as best as I could figure out, what people inside the governments, who had very high security clearances, who were not supposed to talk to me, were saying to one another about what they thought Iraq had and did not have in the area of weapons of mass destruction.”

    Her Iraq coverage didn’t just depend on Chalabi. It also relied heavily on his patrons in the Pentagon. Some of these sources, like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, would occasionally talk to her on the record. She relied especially heavily on the Office of Special Plans, an intelligence unit established beneath Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. The office was charged with uncovering evidence of Al Qaeda links to Saddam Hussein that the CIA might have missed. In particular, Miller is said to have depended on a controversial neocon in Feith’s office named Michael Maloof. At one point, in December 2001, Maloof’s security clearance was revoked. In April, Risen reported in the Times, “Several intelligence professionals say he came under scrutiny because of suspicions that he had leaked classified information in the past to the news media, a charge that Mr. Maloof denies.” While Miller might not have intended to march in lockstep with these hawks, she was caught up in an almost irresistible cycle. Because she kept printing the neocon party line, the neocons kept coming to her with huge stories and great quotes, constantly expanding her access.


    Where Miller exhibited so much hostility to other reporters, she would be fawning and generous to her sources. “Judy treats her sources well, with a sense of loyalty. She’s an attentive and courteous person to them,” one Times reporter says. Her strength was that she viewed the relationships as more than transactional. Her sources were her friends.

    According to some of her critics, they have occasionally been more than friends. In the early eighties, she shared a Georgetown house with her boyfriend, Wisconsin congressman Les Aspin—a rising star in the Democratic Party, who went on to become Bill Clinton’s first secretary of Defense. Aspin, many noted, had appeared a dozen times in Miller’s pieces, offering sage words about national security. Certain catty colleagues liked to read these stories aloud. Each time the phrase “Aspin said” appeared, a reporter would add, “rolling over in bed.” When Reagan nominated Richard Burt to be assistant secretary of State for European affairs, Jesse Helms and other right-wingers bludgeoned him for their relationship. “It would help [your chances for confirmation],” Orrin Hatch delicately wrote to Burt, “if you could lay to rest the rumors about Judith Miller’s articles on arms control appearing so soon after your own meetings with her. . . .”

    The gossip about Miller’s romantic life was circulated most widely by a columnist writing in Spy magazine under the pseudonym J. J. Hunsecker. He chronicled her exploits, referring to her as “frisky deputy bureau chief Judith ‘Is that a banana in your pocket . . .?’ Miller.” As a commentator on the mores of the Times, Hunsecker lacked a certain subtlety. “Miller has been enriching the lives of high-level sources around Washington with her own very special brand of journalistic involvement,” the columnist sneered in 1988. But gradually, the allegations moved from innuendo to out-and-out rumormongering. The column reported, outlandishly, that President George H. W. Bush called his resident political genius, Lee Atwater, into his office “and informed him that it might be better if he ended his very special relationship with Miller.” Hunsecker was hardly credible. He could produce some howlers, and nothing he wrote could necessarily be believed. But the point wasn’t his information, but the way he obtained it. Colleagues within the Times had come to despise Miller so greatly that they apparently picked up the phone, called Spy, and dished their hearts out.

    The war in Iraq was going to be Miller’s journalistic victory lap. Just before the bombs began falling on Baghdad, Miller embedded with Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Alpha—the unit charged with scouring Iraq for weapons of mass destruction. No other journalist would have such access, which meant she would have the exclusive when they uncovered the WMD stockpiles, the smoking gun. As one reporter who covered the war told me, “This was going to be the show.” Back in Kuwait, the Coalition had arranged for helicopter pools that would swoop reporters into WMD sites as MET Alpha uncovered them.

    The Pentagon had seemingly rewarded Miller’s prewar reporting with this sweet arrangement. But it also extracted a high price for her presence. Under most embedding agreements, journalists were provided access in exchange for adhering to a few rigid but simple rules: No reporting on forthcoming military tactics, no revealing of sensitive information about troop positions. For the most part, these rules were enforced by common sense. Reporters censored themselves. Transgressions, they understood, would lead the military to cancel their access and throw them out of Iraq. So, by agreeing to preapproval of her pieces, Miller signed up for something far more restrictive.

    Last month, I traded e-mail with Eugene Pomeroy, a former National Guard soldier who is now working in Baghdad as a contractor for a security firm. During the war, Pomeroy served as the public-affairs officer for MET Alpha. This meant that he had one primary duty: to shepherd Judy Miller around Iraq. It wasn’t a particularly happy experience. In one e-mail to me, he joked, “As far as I can gather, not many people at Defense liked this woman, and the sense I got was that she wasn’t their problem anymore now that she was in Iraq. Maybe they were hoping that she’d step on a mine. I certainly was.”

    Miller guarded her exclusive access with ferocity. When the Post’s Barton Gellman overlapped in MET Alpha for a day, Miller instructed its members not to talk to him.
    According to Pomeroy, as well as an editor at the Times, Miller had helped negotiate her own embedding agreement with the Pentagon—an agreement so sensitive that, according to one Times editor, Rumsfeld himself signed off on it. Although she never fully acknowledged the specific terms of that arrangement in her articles, they were as stringent as any conditions imposed on any reporter in Iraq. “Any articles going out had to be, well, censored,” Pomeroy told me. “The mission contained some highly classified elements and people, what we dubbed the ‘Secret Squirrels,’ and their ‘sources and methods’ had to be protected and a war was about to start.” Before she filed her copy, it would be censored by a colonel who often read the article in his sleeping bag, clutching a small flashlight between his teeth. (When reporters attended tactical meetings with battlefield commanders, they faced similar restrictions.)

    As Miller covered MET Alpha, it became increasingly clear that she had ceased to respect the boundaries between being an observer and a participant. And as an embedded reporter she went even further, several sources say. While traveling with MET Alpha, according to Pomeroy and one other witness, she wore a military uniform.

    When Colonel Richard McPhee ordered MET Alpha to pull back from a search mission and regroup in the town of Talil, Miller disagreed vehemently with the decision—and let her opinions be loudly known. The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz reprinted a note in which she told public-affairs officers that she would write negatively about his decision if McPhee didn’t back down. What’s more, Kurtz reported that Miller complained to her friend Major General David Petraeus. Even though McPhee’s unit fell outside the general’s line of command, Petraeus’s rank gave his recommendation serious heft. According to Kurtz, in an account that was later denied, “McPhee rescinded his withdrawal order after Petraeus advised him to do so.”

    Miller guarded her exclusive access with ferocity. When the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman overlapped in the unit for a day, Miller instructed its members that they couldn’t talk with him. According to Pomeroy, “She told people that she had clearance to be there and Bart didn’t.” (One other witness confirms this account.)

    As MET Alpha began its work in April, Miller sent home a blockbuster about an Iraqi scientist in her unit’s custody. According to Miller, the scientist had told the unit that Iraq had destroyed chemical- and biological-warfare equipment on the eve of the war. And—here’s the real coup—the scientist had led the squad to buried ingredients for chemical-weapons production. Although she told readers that her unit prevented her from naming these precursor elements or the scientist, the military did permit Miller to view him from a distance. “Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, he pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried,” she wrote. And on PBS’s NewsHour, she was even more emphatic: “What they found is a silver bullet in the form of a person.”

    But these scoops, like the story about the scientist, tended to melt quickly in the Iraqi desert. And very soon into the postwar era, the costs of her embedding agreement and her passion for the story became clear. Even though she had more access to MET Alpha, the best seat in the house, she was the only major reporter on the WMD beat to miss the story so completely. MET Alpha was a bumbling unit; and even if it hadn’t been bumbling, it wouldn’t have made a difference—there were no WMDs. The Post’s Gellman, on the other hand, hadn’t embedded with a unit, and didn’t negotiate any access agreements. What’s more, he had the intellectual honesty to repudiate some of his own earlier reporting. He came away from Iraq with a stark, honest story: “Odyssey of Frustration: In Search for Weapons, Army Team Finds Vacuum Cleaners.”

    When the Times published its editor’s note last week, it read, “Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper.”

    This was a bit too sweeping. While there were no heroes within the Times, there were editors who raised serious and consistent doubts about Miller’s reportage. During the run-up to the war, investigations editor Doug Frantz and foreign editor Roger Cohen went to managing editor Gerald Boyd on several occasions with concerns about Miller’s overreliance on Chalabi and his Pentagon champions, especially Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. For instance, Frantz rejected a proposal for a story in which Pentagon officials claimed to have identified between 400 and 1,000 WMD sites, without providing much backup evidence to justify their claims. “At the time, people knew her reporting was suspect and they said so,” one Timesman told me. But Raines and Boyd continually reaffirmed management’s faith in her by putting her stories on page 1. (Both Boyd and Raines declined to speak for this story.)

    aines had a clear reason to defend Miller. By early 2002, she had become one of the paper’s most valuable assets. The Times was being soundly challenged by the Washington Post in its coverage of the war on terror. He’d been especially irked by the attention that his rival garnered with Bob Woodward’s meaty reporting from inside the CIA and FBI throughout the fall and winter, tracing preparations for war in Afghanistan and early investigations into 9/11. For a man who made it his mission to raise the paper’s “competitive metabolism” and expressed his thoughts in sports metaphors, the defeat was especially painful. Judith Miller was the strongest card he had to play. No other reporter had managed to win the trust of the administration hawks and could so consistently deliver Post-beating scoops.

    There were also ideological reasons for him to turn to Miller. During the summer of 2002, Raines had taken a beating for stories by Patrick Tyler that raised questions about support for the war among the Republican foreign-policy establishment. (To be sure, Tyler’s story had arguably attributed antiwar sentiments to Henry Kissinger that he didn’t hold.) The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol pummeled Raines for surrendering to his biases, placing the Times in an “axis of appeasement” that had “now mobilized in a desperate effort to deflect the president from implementing his policy.”

    The Raines response was very un-Rainesian. Instead of “flooding the zone” and pushing ahead with a crusade, he told one close friend that he wanted to prove that he could cover a story straight. An ex-Times editor told me, “He wanted to throw off his liberal credentials and demonstrate that he was fair-minded about the Bush administration. This meant that he bent over backwards to back them often.” In October 2002, James Risen ran an authoritative story casting serious doubt on a purported Prague meeting between the 9/11 terrorist Mohammad Atta and Iraqi intelligence—a meeting that supporters of the war trumpeted as evidence of a Bin Laden–Hussein nexus. Because the story had run in the Monday paper, Raines didn’t have a chance to vet it over the weekend. After the fact, he complained to an editor that it had gone too far. A former editor says, “In the months before the war, Raines consistently objected to articles that questioned the administration’s claims about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda and September 11 while never raising a doubt about Miller’s more dubiously sourced pieces about the presence of weapons of mass destruction.”

    Another management problem was that Miller, like many in her profession, didn’t take well to editing. “Judy has never been shy about crawling over the heads of editors,” says one retired Times colleague. And Raines had crafted Judy’s assignment so that it became extremely easy for her to circumvent the desks. According to one of her editors, she worked stories for investigative one day, foreign the next, and the Washington bureau the day after. It was never clear who controlled or edited her. When one desk stymied her, she’d simply hustle over to another and pitch her story there. It was an editorial vacuum worsened by the absence of a top editor on the investigative unit, her nominal home. Between Doug Frantz’s departure for the Los Angeles Times in March 2003 and Matthew Purdy’s arrival in January 2004, Miller had almost no high-level supervision from editors with investigative experience.

    Many editors I spoke to consider Miller to be such a high-maintenance, uncollegial writer that they’d rather not deal with her at all. One Times veteran says, “She considers us to be her minions.” The process of editing her sounds like an exercise in misery, requiring a constant subjection to her fits of anger; it draws editors into her interoffice disputes with other reporters. Another adds, “There’s only one editor who has had the skill, energy, and willingness to harness her energy—Stephen Engelberg.” But after Engelberg edited a series on Al Qaeda for which Miller and her unit won a Pulitzer in 2001, he left the paper, leaving Miller without the strong hand capable of directing and containing her zealousness. It was a perilous dynamic: By being so difficult, she became so much more vulnerable to journalistic sins than her more affable colleagues.

    So why did it take so long to run an editor’s note? In the newsroom, there are several theories. The first, and least persuasive, is the Sulzberger factor. “There was always the sense, true or not, that she had a benefactor at the top,” says Seth Faison. When Miller joined the Times in the late seventies, she arrived in the Washington bureau at about the same time as Arthur Sulzberger Jr.—a recent college graduate getting hands-on experience in the shop floor of the family business. The D.C. office had only about half a dozen reporters under the age of 35, including Sulzberger, Miller, Steve Rattner, and Phil Taubman. They clung to one another. After work, they would retire to Duke Zeibert’s for a drink. The crowd became even more sociable. When Miller dated Rattner, they shared a weekend house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland with Sulzberger and his wife, Gail. There’s no evidence that Sulzberger ever directly intervened to help Miller, and Miller has undergone enough career reversals to make this hard to believe. Still, that friendship has become well known within the newsroom. Fairly or unfairly, there’s a sense that Miller has protection at the absolute top—and that fear reportedly deters some editors from challenging her.

    The timing of the editor’s note probably had far more to do with the ethos Bill Keller hoped to set for his regime. When he took the job, he promised to avoid ugly recriminations against Raines’s favorites. He felt it was time to move on. His paper would be a far friendlier, more humane place. In a September meeting, according to two sources at the paper, he quietly removed Miller from her coverage of Iraqi WMD. (She denies she was pulled from the beat.) But Keller didn’t want to make a public issue out of this. At a lunch with the paper’s Washington bureau this spring, reporter Douglas Jehl questioned him on the paper’s WMD coverage, asking if the Times owed its readers a thorough reconsideration of its use of Chalabi. Keller replied that he didn’t want to single out any specific reporters for abuse—the same line the paper took in the editor’s note. He believed it was enough to correct the coverage itself. And it might have been were it not for the combustion of Miller’s critics outside and inside the newsroom, all spurred on by the deteriorating situation in Iraq, which forced even the U.S. government to disown the notorious source at the center of the story.

    While the Times has conducted its inquiry, Miller’s WMD coverage has also occasioned a series of less high-minded questions: namely, does Judy Miller live in an apartment divided? During the past year, three intriguing documents have been pushed into the public view that may shed light on this matter. Since 1993, Miller has been married to Jason Epstein, the legendary Random House editor who reinvented paperback publishing in the early fifties. Last May, in the New York Review of Books, Epstein published an excoriation of the Bush administration’s march to war. The war, he blared, was “a preemptive assault whose urgency has not been adequately explained and for which no satisfactory explanation, beyond the zealotry of its sponsors, may exist.” This can be rather effortlessly interpreted as a shot across his wife’s bow: Hadn’t Miller’s oeuvre painted a sufficiently frightening picture of Saddam’s arsenal?

    Document No. 2 also appeared in the New York Review. Before I cite the article, however, it is necessary to say a brief word about the venue. Epstein was a founding father of the journal. His first wife, Barbara Epstein, remains an editor there. Therefore, the Review’s pages were odd ones to showcase a vivisection of Judy Miller’s reporting. But last February, the Review published the critic Michael Massing’s devastating analysis of Miller’s work. Document No. 3 helps set the Massing article in context. The same month that Barbara Epstein ran Massing’s piece, Jason Epstein paid tribute to her in a New York Times Magazine food column. Writing a poignant reminiscence of their 1953 honeymoon, he told readers: “The marriage proved to be bountiful. When after many years, it ended, the love that we celebrated on that December day [their wedding day] remained intact.”

    Predictably, the editor’s note inaugurated a new round of grumbling inside the paper. Reporters complained that the note had mentioned no names, implicitly equating Miller’s sins with those of less-culpable reporters like Michael Gordon and Chris Hedges. Others remarked that it had been buried on A10, not a space normally reserved for serious statements about the paper. One Timesman speculated that these complaints would wend their way into the press: “The rumbling on this reminds me of all the Howell-Blair stuff. Once people started complaining publicly . . . the proverbial cat was out of the bag.” And of course, by making this observation to me, he had fulfilled his own prophecy. A few days later, Daniel Okrent, the public editor, was expected to unveil the conclusions of his own investigation, one he had vowed not to conduct because it concerned events that preceded his—and the new, kinder, more transparent Times’—arrival.

    But making the process more transparent is easier than reforming the profession itself, which inevitably relies on people. People like Miller, with her outsize journalistic temperament of ambition, obsession, and competitive fervor, relying on people like Ahmad Chalabi, with his smooth, affable exterior retailing false information for his own motives, for the benefit of people reading a newspaper, trying to get at the truth of what’s what.




    Artikullin e gjemn ne new york mag

    http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/...26/index4.html
    Ndryshuar për herë të fundit nga HFTengineer : 05-12-2016 më 21:12

  17. #37
    i/e regjistruar Maska e HFTengineer
    Anëtarësuar
    24-04-2016
    Postime
    469

    Për: Gati për luftë”, NATO 300 mijë forca në përballjen me Rusinë

    Former Vice President Dick Cheney kicked off the push for war in August 2002 by claiming: “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” Cheney’s speech had not been vetted by the CIA, and John McLaughlin, the CIA’s deputy director, shortly afterward told Congress that the likelihood of Iraq initiating a WMD attack “would be low.” Another CIA official later recalled that the agency’s reaction to Cheney’s speech was, “Where is he getting this stuff from?”
    The Bush administration said that aluminum tubes Iraq had tried to import were “only really suited for nuclear weapons programs” — even as Bush himself was being told the State Department and Energy Department believed (correctly, of course) they were intended to be used as conventional rockets.
    Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union address that “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” even though his administration had been repeatedly warned this was dubious (and it turned out to originate with crudely forged documents).
    Colin Powell doctored intercepted Iraqi communications for his U.N. presentation to make them appear more alarming.
    … and much more.

    There’s also one specific story proving they lied that I think hasn’t received enough attention: the curious case of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel.

    Kamel was a powerful figure in the Hussein regime, perhaps second only to Saddam himself, and had been in charge of Iraq’s completely real WMD programs in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War. After Iraq was pushed back out of Kuwait by a U.S.-led coalition in 1991, the U.N. Security Council decreed that its harsh sanctions on Iraq would remain until Iraq was disarmed of all WMD programs.

    By 1995, Kamel was disillusioned with Hussein’s rule and defected to Jordan. There he told the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the CIA, and British intelligence an interesting story: Iraq was in fact disarmed, with no remaining chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons programs of any kind. All that remained hidden, he said, was documentation from the 1980s programs, which the U.N. shortly seized from Kamel’s farm back in Iraq.

    While the details of Kamel’s debriefing were not public at the time, he went on CNN to openly declare that “Iraq does not possess any weapons of mass destruction.”

    Kamel quickly realized that the world outside Iraq was not as hospitable as he’d expected, and, in particular, that the U.S. would not send troops to Baghdad in order to oust his father-in-law and put him in charge. In early 1996 he returned to Iraq, where he was promptly assassinated.

    As the U.S. evaluated the Bush administration case for war six years later in the fall of 2002, Kamel’s statements should have been critical information. Certainly Bush officials felt they were: A post-war commission investigating the WMD intelligence debacle mentioned a “Senior Executive Memorandum” of January 12, 2002, “discussing the value of Kamil’s [sic] information.” Senior Executive Memoranda are generally produced by the CIA at the request of high-level officials in the executive branch.

    This is where the lies about Kamel began. If the Bush administration wanted to grapple honestly with Kamel’s story, it would have had to make the case that either Kamel had been lying in 1995 or Iraq had restarted its WMD programs after his defection, or both.

    Instead, the administration turned reality completely on its head. In the same August 2002 speech mentioned above, Cheney claimed this:

    We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we’ve gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors — including Saddam’s own son-in-law [Hussein Kamel].

    This lie should have been easily caught by the U.S. media, given Kamel’s 1995 CNN interview. Moreover, there were public documents sitting on the IAEA website stating the Kamel had told the agency “all nuclear weapons related activities had effectively ceased” in 1991.

    Cheney’s lie didn’t even make sense: Inspectors were still in Iraq when Kamel defected, so if he’d told them Iraq had a nuclear weapons program, the IAEA would have dismantled it.

    Yet none of that made any difference. With no one pointing out Cheney’s blatant falsehood, the rest of the Bush administration eagerly made use of Kamel.

    Several weeks later, in September 2002, Donald Rumsfeld told Congress the U.N. inspections would be useless without informants like Kamel. However, he didn’t mention that Kamel had informed us that Iraq had nothing:

    Unless we have people inside the Iraqi program who are willing to tell us what they have and where they have it — as we did in 1995 with the defection of Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel — it is easy for the Iraqi regime to hide its capabilities from us.

    Shortly afterward, Bush himself mentioned Kamel, as did Colin Powell in his address to the U.N. Security Council.

    This so infuriated someone with access to the detailed notes from one of Kamel’s original debriefings that he or she leaked them to Newsweek, which finally published a brief story about Kamel on March 3, 2003, just a few weeks before the war began. Newsweek did not mention Cheney’s lie about Kamel, but did explain that “the defector’s tale raises questions about whether the WMD stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist.”

    When subsequently questioned by Reuters for a follow-up story, the CIA and MI6 were clearly terrified and went ballistic. The British hilariously claimed that “We’ve checked back and he didn’t say this. He said just the opposite, that the WMD program was alive and kicking.” According to the CIA’s then-spokesperson Bill Harlow, the Newsweek story was “incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue.” (Harlow, who now makes a living defending the CIA’s torture program, recently told me that “I have no intention to engage in an exchange about that single answer to one of the thousands of questions I handled in that job more than a decade ago.”)

    The CIA’s fear was understandable. At just about the same time, Alan Foley, the head of the CIA division in charge of analyzing Iraq’s purported WMD programs, was — according to retired CIA analyst Mel Goodman — privately saying that Iraq possessed “not much, if anything” related to WMD.

    The rest of the story is well-known: The U.S. and allies invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, and Iraq had become a perpetual vortex of violence that may pull in the entire Mideast. We now know not just what Kamel had said in 1995, but that he’d been telling the truth.

    Thus even if you disregard the mountains of evidence that the Bush administration shaded the truth, omitted pertinent facts, and straight-out lied in other areas, the story of Hussein Kamel tells you everything you need to know. Indeed, the Bush administration’s campaign of deceit was so successful at so little real cost that it continued with even more brazen post-invasion lies. For instance, Bush went on to claim that Saddam Hussein “absolutely” had WMD programs and repeatedly said that Iraq “wouldn’t let [U.N. inspectors] in.”




    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ration...r_the_Iraq_War



    etween 1991 and 1998, the United Nations Security Council tasked the United Nations Special Commission on Disarmament (UNSCOM) with finding and destroying Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. In 1996, UNSCOM discovered evidence of continued biological weapons research and supervised destruction of the Al Hakam biological weapons production site—allegedly converted to a chicken feed plant, but retaining its barbed wire fences and antiaircraft defenses.[37][38] In 1998, Scott Ritter, leader of a UNSCOM inspection team, found gaps in the prisoner records of Abu Ghraib when investigating allegations that prisoners had been used to test Anthrax weapons. Asked to explain the missing documents, the Iraqi government charged that Ritter was working for the CIA and refused to cooperate further with UNSCOM.

    On August 26, 1998, approximately two months before the U.S. ordered United Nations inspectors withdrawn from Iraq, Scott Ritter resigned from his position rather than participate in what he called the "illusion of arms control." In his resignation letter to Ambassador Butler,[39] Ritter wrote: "The sad truth is that Iraq today is not disarmed. ... UNSCOM has good reason to believe that there are significant numbers of proscribed weapons and related components and the means to manufacture such weapons unaccounted for in Iraq today … Iraq has lied to the Special Commission and the world since day one concerning the true scope and nature of its proscribed programs and weapons systems." On September 7, 1998, in testimony to the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committee,[40] Scott Ritter was asked by John McCain (R, AZ) whether UNSCOM had intelligence suggesting that Iraq had assembled the components for three nuclear weapons and all that it lacked was the fissile material. Ritter replied: "The Special Commission has intelligence information, which suggests that components necessary for three nuclear weapons exists, lacking the fissile material. Yes, sir."

    On November 8, 2002, the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 1441, giving Iraq "a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations" including unrestricted inspections by the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Saddam Hussein accepted the resolution on November 13 and inspectors returned to Iraq under the direction of UNMOVIC chairman Hans Blix and IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei. Between that time and the time of the invasion, the IAEA "found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq"; the IAEA concluded that certain items which could have been used in nuclear enrichment centrifuges, such as aluminum tubes, were in fact intended for other uses.[41] UNMOVIC "did not find evidence of the continuation or resumption of programmes of weapons of mass destruction" or significant quantities of proscribed items. UNMOVIC did supervise the destruction of a small number of empty chemical rocket warheads, 50 liters of mustard gas that had been declared by Iraq and sealed by UNSCOM in 1998, and laboratory quantities of a mustard gas precursor, along with about 50 Al-Samoud missiles of a design that Iraq claimed did not exceed the permitted 150 km range, but which had travelled up to 183 km in tests. Shortly before the invasion, UNMOVIC stated that it would take "months" to verify Iraqi compliance with resolution 1441.[42][43][4





    The failure to find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq caused considerable controversy, particularly in the United States. U.S. President George W. Bush and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair defended their decision to go to war, alleging that many nations, even those opposed to war, believed that the Hussein government was actively developing WMDs.

    Critics such as Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean charged that the Bush and Blair administrations deliberately falsified evidence to build a case for war.[60] These criticisms were strengthened with the 2005 release of the so-called Downing Street Memo, written in July 2002, in which the former head of British Military Intelligence wrote that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of removing Saddam Hussein from power.[61]

    While the Downing Street Memo and the yellowcake uranium scandal lent credence to claims that intelligence was manipulated, two bipartisan investigations, one by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the other by a specially appointed Iraq Intelligence Commission chaired by Charles Robb and Laurence Silberman, found no evidence of political pressure applied to intelligence analysts.[62] An independent assessment by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that Bush Administration officials did misuse intelligence in their public communications. For example, Vice President Dick Cheney's September 2002 statement on Meet the Press that "we do know, with absolute certainty, that he (Saddam) is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon," was inconsistent with the views of the intelligence community at the time.[62]

    A study coauthored by the Center for Public Integrity found that in the two years after September 11, 2001 the president and top administration officials had made 935 false statements, in an orchestrated public relations campaign to galvanize public opinion for the war, and that the press was largely complicit in its uncritical coverage of the reasons adduced for going to war.[63][64] PBS commentator Bill Moyers had made similar points throughout the run up to the Iraq War, and prior to a national press conference on the Iraq War[65] Moyers correctly predicted "at least a dozen times during this press conference he [the President] will invoke 9/11 and Al-Qaeda to justify a preemptive attack on a country that has not attacked America. But the White House press corps will ask no hard questions tonight about those claims."[66][67] Moyers later also denounced the complicity of the press in the administration's campaign for the war, saying that the media "surrendered its independence and skepticism to join with [the U.S.] government in marching to war," and that the administration "needed a compliant press, to pass on their propaganda as news and cheer them on."[67]

    Many in the intelligence community expressed sincere regret over the flawed predictions about Iraqi weapons programs. Testifying before Congress in January 2004, David Kay, the original director of the Iraq Survey Group, said unequivocally that "It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing."[68] He later added in an interview that the intelligence community owed the President an apology.[69]

    In the aftermath of the invasion, much attention was also paid to the role of the press in promoting government claims concerning WMD production in Iraq. Between 1998 and 2003, The New York Times and other influential U.S. newspapers published numerous articles about suspected Iraqi rearmament programs with headlines like "Iraqi Work Toward A-Bomb Reported" and "Iraq Suspected of Secret Germ War Effort." It later turned out that many of the sources for these articles were unreliable, and that some were tied to Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi exile with close ties to the Bush Administration who was a consistent supporter of an invasion.[70][71][72]

    Some controversy also exists regarding whether the invasion increased or decreased the potential for nuclear proliferation. For example, hundreds of tons of dual-use high explosives that could be used to detonate fissile material in a nuclear weapon were sealed by the IAEA at the Al Qa'qaa site in January 2003. Immediately before the invasion, UN Inspectors had checked the locked bunker doors, but not the actual contents; the bunkers also had large ventilation shafts that were not sealed. By October, the material was no longer present. The IAEA expressed concerns that the material might have been looted after the invasion, posing a nuclear proliferation threat. The U.S. released satellite photographs from March 17, showing trucks at the site large enough to remove substantial amounts of material before U.S. forces reached the area in April. Ultimately, Major Austin Pearson of Task Force Bullet, a task force charged with securing and destroying Iraqi ammunition after the invasion, stated that the task force had removed about 250 tons of material from the site and had detonated it or used it to detonate other munitions. Similar concerns were raised about other dual use materials, such as high strength aluminum; before the invasion, the U.S. cited them as evidence for an Iraqi nuclear weapons program, while the IAEA was satisfied that they were being used for permitted industrial uses; after the war, the IAEA emphasized the proliferation concern, while the Duelfer report mentioned the material's use as scrap. Possible chemical weapons laboratories have also been found which were built subsequent to the 2003 invasion, apparently by insurgent forces.[73]

    On August 2, 2004, President Bush stated "Knowing what I know today we still would have gone on into Iraq. … The decision I made is the right decision. The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power."[74]


    Pretexi tjeter ishte qe sadmai kishte lidhje me terroristet


    Along with Iraq's alleged development of WMDs, another justification for invasion was the purported link between Saddam Hussein's government and terrorist organizations, in particular Al-Qaeda.[75] In that sense, the Bush Administration cast the Iraq war as part of the broader War on Terrorism. As with the argument that Iraq was developing biological and nuclear weapons, evidence linking Hussein and Al-Qaeda was discredited by multiple U.S. intelligence agencies soon after the invasion of Iraq.[5]


    Kur sadami dishie qe i shtypte alqaiden dhe isl dhe madje i beri dhe lufte dhe ata dolen mbas sadamit.

    Amerika eshte derjtperderejt arsya qe u ngriaten isis dhe krisa humnaitare basi jo vetem hoqen sadmin qe i shtypte:



    http://www.vox.com/2015/11/19/9760284/isis-history


    Por u kapen shuime her duke i financuar :

    E ke ne la time gazetete tjheter presigjoze

    http://www.latimes.com/world/middlee...327-story.html


    Ne telegraf

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...and-Syria.html


    Si shkuan forcat sirjane te trajnuara nga amerkianet ne isis ;



    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...-in-Syria.html


    Armet qe u kapen:
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ected-al-qaida

    Dhe nga aletate amerikane ;
    http://www.businessinsider.com/isis-...-allies-2014-6


    Etj mun ta mbush me arikuj.

    Po tishte amerika per paqe nuk do ishte kjo krize qe ehste sot dhe noekoservativet nuk do ishin implikuar qe dihen qe jane lobilistet me te fuqishem pro izraelit se bashku me aipcac.

    http://mondoweiss.net/2012/02/the-ir...-did-it-do-it/
    Ndryshuar për herë të fundit nga HFTengineer : 05-12-2016 më 20:54

  18. #38
    i/e regjistruar Maska e HFTengineer
    Anëtarësuar
    24-04-2016
    Postime
    469

    Për: Gati për luftë”, NATO 300 mijë forca në përballjen me Rusinë

    Pervec ksaj wiki leaks qe postoji qe amerik kishte relata me isis



    https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/0...CUS5399_a.html


    http://en.abna24.com/service/america...679/story.html

    Qe dhe shoqata judcial watch qe postoji leaks te pentagonit


    E keni ktu
    https://www.judicialwatch.org/docume...tate-14-812-2/

    The West’s Islamists
    The newly declassified DIA document from 2012 confirms that the main component of the anti-Assad rebel forces by this time comprised Islamist insurgents affiliated to groups that would lead to the emergence of ISIS. Despite this, these groups were to continue receiving support from Western militaries and their regional allies.

    Noting that “the Salafist [sic], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,” the document states that “the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition,” while Russia, China and Iran “support the [Assad] regime.”




    e Salafist [sic], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,” the document states that “the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition,” while Russia, China and Iran “support the [Assad] regime.”

    The 7-page DIA document states that al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the precursor to the ‘Islamic State in Iraq,’ (ISI) which became the ‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,’ “supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media.”

    The formerly secret Pentagon report notes that the “rise of the insurgency in Syria” has increasingly taken a “sectarian direction,” attracting diverse support from Sunni “religious and tribal powers” across the region.

    In a section titled ‘The Future Assumptions of the Crisis,’ the DIA report predicts that while Assad’s regime will survive, retaining control over Syrian territory, the crisis will continue to escalate “into proxy war.”

    The document also recommends the creation of “safe havens under international sheltering, similar to what transpired in Libya when Benghazi was chosen as the command centre for the temporary government.”

    In Libya, anti-Gaddafi rebels, most of whom were al-Qaeda affiliated militias, were protected by NATO ‘safe havens’ (aka ‘no fly zones’).

    ‘Supporting powers want’ ISIS entity
    In a strikingly prescient prediction, the Pentagon document explicitly forecasts the probable declaration of “an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria.”

    Nevertheless, “Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey are supporting these efforts” by Syrian “opposition forces” fighting to “control the eastern areas (Hasaka and Der Zor), adjacent to Western Iraqi provinces (Mosul and Anbar)”:

    “… there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”
    The secret Pentagon document thus provides extraordinary confirmation that the US-led coalition currently fighting ISIS, had three years ago welcomed the emergence of an extremist “Salafist Principality” in the region as a way to undermine Assad, and block off the strategic expansion of Iran. Crucially, Iraq is labeled as an integral part of this “Shia expansion.”

    The establishment of such a “Salafist Principality” in eastern Syria, the DIA document asserts, is “exactly” what the “supporting powers to the [Syrian] opposition want.” Earlier on, the document repeatedly describes those “supporting powers” as “the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey.”

    Further on, the document reveals that Pentagon analysts were acutely aware of the dire risks of this strategy, yet ploughed ahead anyway.

    The establishment of such a “Salafist Principality” in eastern Syria, it says, would create “the ideal atmosphere for AQI to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi.” Last summer, ISIS conquered Mosul in Iraq, and just this month has also taken control of Ramadi.

    Such a quasi-state entity will provide:

    “… a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria, and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against what it considers one enemy. ISI could also declare an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of territory.”
    The 2012 DIA document is an Intelligence Information Report (IIR), not a “finally evaluated intelligence” assessment, but its contents are vetted before distribution. The report was circulated throughout the US intelligence community, including to the State Department, Central Command, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, FBI, among other agencies.

    In response to my questions about the strategy, the British government simply denied the Pentagon report’s startling revelations of deliberate Western sponsorship of violent extremists in Syria. A British Foreign Office spokesperson said:

    “AQ and ISIL are proscribed terrorist organisations. The UK opposes all forms of terrorism. AQ, ISIL, and their affiliates pose a direct threat to the UK’s national security. We are part of a military and political coalition to defeat ISIL in Iraq and Syria, and are working with international partners to counter the threat from AQ and other terrorist groups in that region. In Syria we have always supported those moderate opposition groups who oppose the tyranny of Assad and the brutality of the extremists.”
    The DIA did not respond to request for comment.



    The 2012 DIA document is an Intelligence Information Report (IIR), not a “finally evaluated intelligence” assessment, but its contents are vetted before distribution. The report was circulated throughout the US intelligence community, including to the State Department, Central Command, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, FBI, among other agencies.

    In response to my questions about the strategy, the British government simply denied the Pentagon report’s startling revelations of deliberate Western sponsorship of violent extremists in Syria. A British Foreign Office spokesperson said:

    “AQ and ISIL are proscribed terrorist organisations. The UK opposes all forms of terrorism. AQ, ISIL, and their affiliates pose a direct threat to the UK’s national security. We are part of a military and political coalition to defeat ISIL in Iraq and Syria, and are working with international partners to counter the threat from AQ and other terrorist groups in that region. In Syria we have always supported those moderate opposition groups who oppose the tyranny of Assad and the brutality of the extremists.”
    The DIA did not respond to request for comment.

    Strategic asset for regime-change
    Security analyst Shoebridge, however, who has tracked Western support for Islamist terrorists in Syria since the beginning of the war, pointed out that the secret Pentagon intelligence report exposes fatal contradictions at the heart of official pronunciations:

    “Throughout the early years of the Syria crisis, the US and UK governments, and almost universally the West’s mainstream media, promoted Syria’s rebels as moderate, liberal, secular, democratic, and therefore deserving of the West’s support. Given that these documents wholly undermine this assessment, it’s significant that the West’s media has now, despite their immense significance, almost entirely ignored them.”
    According to Brad Hoff, a former US Marine who served during the early years of the Iraq War and as a 9/11 first responder at the Marine Corps Headquarters in Battalion Quantico from 2000 to 2004, the just released Pentagon report for the first time provides stunning affirmation that:

    “US intelligence predicted the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), but instead of clearly delineating the group as an enemy, the report envisions the terror group as a US strategic asset.”
    Hoff, who is managing editor of Levant Report — ?an online publication run by Texas-based educators who have direct experience of the Middle East?—?points out that the DIA document “matter-of-factly” states that the rise of such an extremist Salafist political entity in the region offers a “tool for regime change in Syria.”

    The DIA intelligence report shows, he said, that the rise of ISIS only became possible in the context of the Syrian insurgency?—?“there is no mention of US troop withdrawal from Iraq as a catalyst for Islamic State’s rise, which is the contention of innumerable politicians and pundits.” The report demonstrates that:

    “The establishment of a ‘Salafist Principality’ in Eastern Syria is ‘exactly’ what the external powers supporting the opposition want (identified as ‘the West, Gulf Countries, and Turkey’) in order to weaken the Assad government.”
    The rise of a Salafist quasi-state entity that might expand into Iraq, and fracture that country, was therefore clearly foreseen by US intelligence as likely?—?but nevertheless strategically useful?—?blowback from the West’s commitment to “isolating Syria.”

    Complicity
    Critics of the US-led strategy in the region have repeatedly raised questions about the role of coalition allies in intentionally providing extensive support to Islamist terrorist groups in the drive to destabilize the Assad regime in Syria.

    The conventional wisdom is that the US government did not retain sufficient oversight on the funding to anti-Assad rebel groups, which was supposed to be monitored and vetted to ensure that only ‘moderate’ groups were supported.

    However, the newly declassified Pentagon report proves unambiguously that years before ISIS launched its concerted offensive against Iraq, the US intelligence community was fully aware that Islamist militants constituted the core of Syria’s sectarian insurgency.

    Despite that, the Pentagon continued to support the Islamist insurgency, even while anticipating the probability that doing so would establish an extremist Salafi stronghold in Syria and Iraq.

    As Shoebridge told me, “The documents show that not only did the US government at the latest by August 2012 know the true extremist nature and likely outcome of Syria’s rebellion”?—?namely, the emergence of ISIS?—?“but that this was considered an advantage for US foreign policy. This also suggests a decision to spend years in an effort to deliberately mislead the West’s public, via a compliant media, into believing that Syria’s rebellion was overwhelmingly ‘moderate.’”

    Annie Machon, a former MI5 intelligence officer who blew the whistle in the 1990s on MI6 funding of al-Qaeda to assassinate Libya’s former leader Colonel Gaddafi, similarly said of the revelations:

    “This is no surprise to me. Within individual countries there are always multiple intelligence agencies with competing agendas.”
    She explained that MI6’s Libya operation in 1996, which resulted in the deaths of innocent people, “happened at precisely the time when MI5 was setting up a new section to investigate al-Qaeda.”

    This strategy was repeated on a grand scale in the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, said Machon, where the CIA and MI6 were:

    “… supporting the very same Libyan groups, resulting in a failed state, mass murder, displacement and anarchy. So the idea that elements of the American military-security complex have enabled the development of ISIS after their failed attempt to get NATO to once again ‘intervene’ is part of an established pattern. And they remain indifferent to the sheer scale of human suffering that is unleashed as a result of such game-playing.”
    Divide and rule
    Several US government officials have conceded that their closest allies in the anti-ISIS coalition were funding violent extremist Islamist groups that became integral to ISIS.

    US Vice President Joe Biden, for instance, admitted last year that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Turkey had funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Islamist rebels in Syria that metamorphosed into ISIS.

    But he did not admit what this internal Pentagon document demonstrates?—?that the entire covert strategy was sanctioned and supervised by the US, Britain, France, Israel and other Western powers.

    The strategy appears to fit a policy scenario identified by a recent US Army-commissioned RAND Corp report.

    The report, published four years before the DIA document, called for the US “to capitalise on the Shia-Sunni conflict by taking the side of the conservative Sunni regimes in a decisive fashion and working with them against all Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world.”

    The US would need to contain “Iranian power and influence” in the Gulf by “shoring up the traditional Sunni regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan.” Simultaneously, the US must maintain “a strong strategic relationship with the Iraqi Shiite government” despite its Iran alliance.

    The RAND report confirmed that the “divide and rule” strategy was already being deployed “to create divisions in the jihadist camp. Today in Iraq such a strategy is being used at the tactical level.”

    The report observed that the US was forming “temporary alliances” with al-Qaeda affiliated “nationalist insurgent groups” that have fought the US for four years in the form of “weapons and cash.” Although these nationalists “have cooperated with al-Qaeda against US forces,” they are now being supported to exploit “the common threat that al-Qaeda now poses to both parties.”

    The 2012 DIA document, however, further shows that while sponsoring purportedly former al-Qaeda insurgents in Iraq to counter al-Qaeda, Western governments were simultaneously arming al-Qaeda insurgents in Syria.

    The revelation from an internal US intelligence document that the very US-led coalition supposedly fighting ‘Islamic State’ today, knowingly created ISIS in the first place, raises troubling questions about recent government efforts to justify the expansion of state anti-terror powers.

    In the wake of the rise of ISIS, intrusive new measures to combat extremism including mass surveillance, the Orwellian ‘prevent duty’ and even plans to enable government censorship of broadcasters, are being pursued on both sides of the Atlantic, much of which disproportionately targets activists, journalists and ethnic minorities, especially Muslims.

    Yet the new Pentagon report reveals that, contrary to Western government claims, the primary cause of the threat comes from their own deeply misguided policies of secretly sponsoring Islamist terrorism for dubious geopolitical purposes.
    Ndryshuar për herë të fundit nga HFTengineer : 05-12-2016 më 21:25

  19. #39
    i/e regjistruar Maska e HFTengineer
    Anëtarësuar
    24-04-2016
    Postime
    469

    Për: Gati për luftë”, NATO 300 mijë forca në përballjen me Rusinë

    Citim Postuar më parë nga arbereshi_niko Lexo Postimin
    Gjithesesi nuk me je drejtuar mua, une me pare se te pergjigjem do te uroj "mire se ardhjen" , gjithashtu "ngushellime" per Clinton-nen... :-)
    Ti shume e deshiroje te vinte ne pushtet ajo qe do te provonte forcen me Putin...
    Por ja qe amerikanet e kuptuan qe nuk eshte armiku i tyre Vladimir Putin, por izis dhe daesh apo al-nusra qe ti
    ( mos te rriten veshet pasi me "TI" dmth ata si ti... ) dhe Clinton i quani " opozite e moderuar ".
    Ja pra nga vjen edhe diskutimi i shtrembur qe ke per Putin, jo pse Kosova keshtu e bombat ne Alepo ashtu, jo Ukraina apo Krimea,
    jo Putin diktator qe ka uzurpuar "kolltukun" e presidentit per 40 vjet , jo terci e verci...............
    Angela Merkel nga data 22 nentor 2005 deri me sot eshte ne menyre te vazhdueshme kopo e padiskutueshme e Gjermanise...
    Pse nuk e akuzon ti qe njeh politiken dhe etiketon te tjeret si diktatore? pastaj ajo dje hodhi edhe nje here kandidaturen per te katerten here konsekutive ne krye te Gjermanise,
    po as’kujt nuk i vajti ne mend ta akuzoje si diktatore!
    Putin ka hipur ne fuqi me 31 dhjetor te 1999 pra vetem 12 ore perpara vitit 2000 e kjo vazhdoi per dy mandate 7 maj 2008, pasi nuk lejohet ne Rusi me shume,
    keshtu ne daten 7 maj te 2012 ai u rizgjodh perseri si president deri me sot, gezon mbi 89% te elektoratit rus dhe nuk i behet vone kujt se ç’flasim neve ne forumin shqiptar…,
    pasi tifozllekun tone ketu nuk e konsideron njeri.
    Pra po te vihej ne diskutim ky uzurpim i postit presidencjal, Putin nuk eshte as me pak e as me shume
    “uzurpues” se sa koleget e tjere ne Evrope. Pasi flitet per pak me shume se 11 vjet si per Putin ashtu edhe per Merkel,
    ku kjo e fundit me te drejte kerkon te katertin mandat si kanceljere, pse jo?
    Por Putin eshte per ty diktator, kriminel, misherimi i te keqes, armiku i njerezimit, edhe nofka nga me te ndryshmet,
    por i nderuar mesia4ever, ai ben interesat e vendit te tij, ta kishim neve nje si ky Putin.
    Putin mund ta akuzosh per ç’fare te duash ti e une bashke, por qe po ta kishim edhe neve nje “putin”
    gjerat do te shkonin me mire per gjithe kombin tone… , ta garantoj ! Shqiptaret do te kishin me shume peshe ne Rrajon!
    Ate e kane zgjedhur mbi 80 % e popullit rus, ku sondazhet luhaten sipas rrethanave historike, momentet e ndryshme qe jetojme, lufta ne Lindjen e Mesme dhe ajo civile ne Ukrahine,
    ose Krimea (sot Rusi )ku 97 % e popullsise votoi per bashkim me Rusine dhe ku 98% per Putin.
    Tani edhe Clinton-ja ( ajo e preferuara jote ) e urrente bash si ti, kete Vladimir Vladimiroviç-in …
    por ja qe kohet ndryshojne dhe ku i dihet ndoshta edhe ti me kohen…, do te ndryshosh.
    Sidoqofte nuk pi fare uje se si e mendon, por mos ler nam duke folur per çart kunder…, pasi Putin nuk te degjon…!
    Ja kalofsh mire dhe mos e merr si personale, pasi diskutohet pikerisht se kemi ide te ndryshme dhe te kunderta, por pa hiperbolizuar dhe deformuar gjerat.
    Pershendetje

    Mos u lodh jo vetem qe ai sdi gje per putinin por se ka idense pse nuk u zgjodh klintoni,
    Eshte bote tjeter boten idjotave as nuk kupton qe pse se votuan hillarin as ekonimikisht as ushtrakisht apo ne arenen nderkjomntare me miljonat e lobura nga finainca, medja, hollowoodi, silicon valley, organizatat politike shqoerore, saudet, dhe nje nga political kampain shume agresive.
    450 miljone invetsime kundra 100 prarp fitoi ai.

    Vashdon me emocjonet dhe idjotlliqet idjologjike, kur njerzit ne shume vende pervec new yokeut cikagos washingtonit dhe california ku jane kta kokat elitiste te cifutve, jane pa pune e pa shpresa dhe , jane ne tre luftra e dy proxy lufta, e jane duke paguar taksa per kto luftra.

    E njejta gje ne evrope qe po dalin ktom levizjet pupuliste ne italij qe po i ngrihen, ne france pa punsia po krize ekonmike, krize emigracjoni po, krize implikimi ne arendn nderkomtare edhe madje gjermanise me protesta klundra emigracjonit, dhe anglise me breexit.
    Ne gerqi spanje ke protesta cdo tre muaj. Trecku i evropes e ke gati vetem nje shtyrje.
    Edhe na austri per pak sfitoi e djathta dhe ishte me shume pak vota.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-norbert-hofer

    http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/05/europe...nic-robertson/

    Ne shume vende ne evrope dhe per pak do arrij goxhda ne kocke jane gati te marrin zjarr. Fitimi i levizjet te djathta ,po e ndimojne te ulet pak nervat, ndryshe edhe pak do i kishe ne per rruge.

    Votimi i levizjve te djathta ka ardhjur si pasoj se njerzve po i vjen gozhda ne kocke dhe po nzjerrin inatinin, jane perjigje kundra polities elitiste shumnica demokratike qe eshte anti middle class qe ne politkat ekonomike deri tek politkat e emigracjoni polikat e arenes nderkombtare /nderhyrse , jo se jane ndjekes politikane te mirfillte.Kta jane ata qe as merren me politike ne shumicen e rasteve.
    Ndryshuar për herë të fundit nga HFTengineer : 05-12-2016 më 22:20

  20. #40
    i/e regjistruar Maska e HFTengineer
    Anëtarësuar
    24-04-2016
    Postime
    469

    Për: Gati për luftë”, NATO 300 mijë forca në përballjen me Rusinë

    Citim Postuar më parë nga mesia4ever Lexo Postimin
    Spo kam kohe te te bej replike per te gjithe postimin por per kete pjese po te bej i nderuar.
    Kom pas qef ma shume me fitu Klintoni sepse ne shqiptaret e Kosoves kemi lidhje emocionale me shume me familjen Klinton, vetem per kete me shume pra kam patur deshire qe ajo te zgjidhej presidente.
    Klintoni e as Trump nuk mund t'i bejne balle Putinit. Putini kerkon nje dore te forte si Xhorxh Bushi apo Gjon Mek Kein, pra njerez qe jane provuar me luftera e tortura (i fundit) dhe qe nuk i frikesohen asaj. Ata skane qene dhe nuk do te ishin president qe nga studimet apo nga zyreja e biznesit hyjne ne presidence.
    Rusia nuk eshte armik direkt i ShBA-ve por me Putinin eshte vend kundershtar i tyre. Kete shumica e amerikaneve te informuar e dijne. Cfar budalle je bere si myslimanet e ketij forumi pa piken e logjikes, ty ste duket asgje e keqe qe nje njeri te qendroje ne pushtet deri ne vdekje dhe te beje luftera sulmuese ndaj kombeve e shteteve tjera sepse ato kombe apo shtete duan nje te ardhme me te mire per veten e tyre. A e di ti qe cdo njeri qe ka qendruar gjate ne pushtet dhe qe nuk ka dashur ta leshoje ate ai shtet ka shkuar ne tirani. Edhe ti ke patur nje drejtues si Putinin, Enver Hoxhen qe me shume vrau shqiptare dhe e izoloi vendin e tij nga bota e qyteteruar perendimore dhe shkoi me ruse e kineze puro komuniste. Po te shkonte me perendimin sot Shqiperia moti do te ishte ne BE dhe do te kishte standard jetese shume me te larte sesa qe ka sot. Keto probleme qe i ka sot do t'i zgjidhte viteve te 80'ta. Por keshtu edhe ne ate kohe ka patur shqiptare si ti qe nuk ua duan te miren vendit te tyre e as vetes se tyre madje.
    Sa paske ndjekur historine dhe politiken.
    Ne qeverine e klintonit neoconsveratsiat qe e shtyen ne lufte me kosoven jo se i plasi shume per kosovaret ,por kishin nje synim qe te thyenin rusine e athershme, duke qene se cifutet humben pushtetin politik mbas bolshevikve dhe perfundimisht me vedkjen e stalinit me gjithe se ai vrau kunderstaret prap kishin fuqi fjalimi i famshem per fene e lenininit venjen e ligjeve me denim kunder cdo antisemsi, dhe mga se rrethoheshe qe ne postet qe mbajti gulaket e lenininit, derite postet e tjera adminstratore, ne vitet 70 -80 dukesh qart qe skishin pushtet ishin ruset qe benin poliken dhe pak cifute , ishte kryesorja dhe ata arriten te marrin politiken ekonomike me nikten krushovin dhe me vone pasuesin boris yelsin, pervec asaj neoconsveratve donin te krijonin aleat apo zara sunit. Me tuqrine nuk e kishin edhe aq mire sepse kishte politika anti israelite.
    Kshuqe ne evrope i ngelte bosnja dhe kosova..

    http://www.aim.org/aim-column/clintons-kosovo-whopper/

    Ata e shtyen per irakun mbas kosoves mbas dehstimit me bushin e pare me operation desret storm, por Bill Klintoni i kushtoi rendsi me shume neoliberalismzit qe babai i naftes caftes dhe finczimit te ekonomise dhe derugluacjoneve bashke me mebturine tjeter al gore.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econom...f_Bill_Clinton

    http://www.economonitor.com/blog/201...clinton-years/

    https://www.thenation.com/article/no...ost-americans/

    Bushi i dyte qe i rendeshem dhe i fort ?

    Bushi qe pall qe talshin gjith t.

    Bushit ja ben komplet politiken kta neoconsrevtistat dhe qe komplet i mbushur me ta:

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/revie...oconservatives



    Emrat i ke gjithahstu spier.

    John macain nje **** qe se voti asnje ne amerikje dhe iku sa langraq ja futen ,shum i fort eshte ai .


    Do e grin ****** sa do gerijne pastaj do ta hajn, se po krruhen me gjithe antaret e BRICS.
    Po kruhen dhe me kinen .
    Ndryshuar për herë të fundit nga HFTengineer : 06-12-2016 më 20:31

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