The War on Terror

Exaggerated Internal and External Threats 

The making of the terror myth

Since September 11 Britain [and the U.S.] has been warned of the 'inevitability' of catastrophic terrorist attack. But has the danger been exaggerated? A major new TV documentary claims that the perceived threat is a politically driven fantasy - and al-Qaida a dark illusion.

Toying With Terror Alerts

In these perilous days, we must be ready to think the unthinkable. No, I don't mean the possibility of a catastrophic terrorist attack. After 9/11, that's all too easy to imagine. No, I'm talking about a thought that even now seldom forces its way into respectable conversation: the quite reasonable suspicion that the Bush Administration orchestrates its terror alerts and arrests to goose the GOP's poll numbers.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

The full text of U.S. Senator Robert Byrd's famous speech on how the citizens of the United States were tricked into the Iraq War and then bullied into not ending that war.

Signing Statements, Secrecy 

Bush challenges hundreds of laws

President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ''whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.

Bush Secrecy Policies have Transformed U.S. Government from "Open" to "Closed"

President George W. Bush has transformed an open federal government in Washington into one of "pervasive secrecy," a distinguished authority on communications and First Amendment rights says. (...)

"Through executive agency opinions, executive orders, statutory changes, and aggressive litigation, the Bush Administration has effectively limited the power of FOIA(Freedom of Information Act) and reversed the presumption that government records should be available to the public absent demonstrable proof showing that secrecy is needed."

Pre-Emptive War in Iraq 

The Case Against War in Iraq

A war against Iraq has no logical connection to the tragic events of Sept. 11. Rather than diminishing terrorism, such an attack would further inflame anger against the United States and may well lead to more terrorist attacks. We have a right to wonder if the motive for war is not stopping terrorism but expanding US power and controlling Mideast oil.

A preemptive war against Iraq, legally impermissible, morally unpardonable, would be a cause for shame to future generations.

'Just War' Doctrine Abandoned. Ron Paul Objected. Here's Why

[The Just War Doctrine] is a set of 'ethics' when deciding about using violence, and it has been accepted and practiced; when it is violated humanity faces grave dangers in the violence, and justification for war, getting way out of hand.

Sinister U.S. Reliance on Mercenaries in the War on Terror 

Huge wages, frightening brutality, not answerable to any laws or conventions

Privatising War

It has apparently become Pentagon policy to hire mercenaries in American wars, despite official denials. According to Peter Singer, a security analyst at the Brookings Institution and author of Corporate Warriors, private companies offering specialised military services for hire played a major support role in most of the wars in which the US was involved in the 1990s, including Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, the Balkans and East Timor. But this role has increased exponentially in America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Illegal and Indefinite Detention by the United States 

Habeas Corpus, R.I.P. (1215 - 2006)

With a smug stroke of his pen, President Bush is set to wipe out a safeguard against illegal imprisonment that has endured as a cornerstone of legal justice since the Magna Carta.

U.S. Can Confine Citizens Without Charges, Court Rules

A federal appeals court yesterday backed the president's power to indefinitely detain a U.S. citizen captured on U.S. soil without any criminal charges, holding that such authority is vital during wartime to protect the nation from terrorist attacks.

US-Led Force Holds Thousands Without Due Process

The United Nations Security Council should address serious concerns about the detention practices of the US-led Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF) in its debate on Iraq, Human Rights Watch said in a letter to council members. The United States invokes Security Council resolutions to justify holding thousands of Iraqis for indefinite periods, without judicial review, and under military processes that do not meet international standards.

U.S. Admits Detaining 2,500 Children, Often For a Year or More

Last week, the United States told the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child that since 2002 it had detained some 2,500 people under age 18, mostly in Iraq, often for a year or more, as part of its anti-terrorism campaign.

US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships

The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

McCain: Habeas Corpus a Privilege not a Right

McCain's dangerous philosophy of rights as privileges is a recipe for tyranny. Government gives us our liberty? Is he serious? Well then that makes the state our god.

The United States of Torture? 

Waterboarding is torture - I did it myself, says US advisor

In a further embarrassment for Mr Bush yesterday, Malcolm Nance, an advisor on terrorism to the US departments of Homeland Security, Special Operations and Intelligence, publicly denounced the practice. He revealed that waterboarding is used in training at the US Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School in San Diego, and claimed to have witnessed and supervised "hundreds" of waterboarding exercises. Although these last only a few minutes and take place under medical supervision, he concluded that "waterboarding is a torture technique - period".

CIA admits they will continue rendition program, which allows torture overseas

The CIA also acknowledged in their filings that the program "will continue." Terror suspects detained or "renditioned" by the United States are transferred to third party countries that allow torture which gives the US a legal loophole to allow harsh interrogation without being legally liable. Such suspects, who effectively disappear, are held without access to courts.

Carter says U.S. tortures prisoners

"Our country for the first time in my life time has abandoned the basic principle of human rights," Carter said. "We've said that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to those people in Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo, and we've said we can torture prisoners and deprive them of an accusation of a crime to which they are accused."

A Kinder, Gentler Torture

In American custody, Al-Ghizzawi was only beaten with chains; bound to chairs in excruciating positions for endless hours; threatened with death and with rape; stripped and subjected to body-cavity searches by non-medical personnel while men -- and women -- laughed and took pictures.

Among many other brutalities and indignities, Al-Ghizzawi was also posed naked with other prisoners; terrorized with dogs; forced to kneel on stones in the searing heat; left to stand or crouch for extended periods; deprived of sleep; subjected to extreme cold without clothes or covering; denied medical attention; and kept in isolation for years.

The True Death Toll in Iraq in the War on Terror 

Casualties in Iraq - 2008

This page on casualties in Iraq details the human cost of the Iraq occupation.

Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

Afghanistan death toll rising

Six years after US forces began fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, new figures have been released showing the violence there is worse than ever.

War Profiteering in the War on Terror 

BBC uncovers lost Iraq billions

A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn (£11.75bn) may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq.

Henry Waxman who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said: "It may well turn out to be the largest war profiteering in history."

When Will US "Journalism" Be Held Accountable for Promoting War? 

McClellan's Missile: Media Crimes As War Crimes

To be honest, what's needed here are not more confessions by political insiders but an actual trial of the perpetrators. This government strategy, and the media coverage that served it, were not just mistakes or lapses in otherwise accurate coverage but crimes with real world consequences. Try a million dead in Iraq, and 4,000 Americans. And counting...

Disappearing Industries, Over Borrowing 

Borrowing from China

We've spent $400 billion [on the Iraq war] so far [January 2007], with no end in sight.

This is money we don't have. It is all borrowed from countries like China, that increasingly succeed in the global economy while we drain wealth from our citizens through heavy taxation and insidious inflation. Our manufacturing base is now nearly extinct.

It's the Iraq War that's Killing the Economy, Stupid!

As billions are going down the drain in Iraq, this wild misadventure is destroying the once strong U.S. dollar.

Where's the Care for the Soldiers? 

U.S. Troops in Iraq Have Limited Body Armor

The Department of Defense has provided thousands of top-of-the-line protective vests to coalition forces on the ground while some U.S. troops in Iraq have been asked to take their chances with inferior flak jackets, sources told Foxnews.com.

The American military has certified the use of body armor that can stop rounds from a Kalashnikov rifle, a 9-millimeter handgun and fragments from a grenade. The material used is lightweight and not too restrictive. So far, more than two dozen soldiers in Afghanistan credit the vests with saving their lives.

(Oct.24, 2003)

Where's the Care for the Veterans? 

Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army's Top Medical Facility

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.

This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

VA tried to conceal extent of attempted veteran suicides, email shows

The email was disclosed Tuesday in a federal trial at a courthouse in Northern California, where two veterans advocacy groups filed a class-action lawsuit against the VA alleging that a systematic breakdown at the VA has led to an epidemic of suicides among war veterans. These groups claim the VA has turned away veterans who have sought help for posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD] and were suicidal. Some of the veterans, the lawsuit claims, later took their own lives.

Soldiers risk ruin while awaiting benefit checks

Stevens' descent from Army private first-class, 3rd Infantry Division, 11 Bravo Company, began in 2005 -- not in battle, since he was never sent off to Iraq or Afghanistan, but with a headfirst fall over a wall on the obstacle course at Fort Benning, Ga. He suffered a head injury and spinal damage.

The injury alone didn't put him in a homeless shelter. Instead, it was military bureaucracy -- specifically, the way injured soldiers are discharged on just a fraction of their salary and then forced to wait six to nine months, and sometimes even more than a year, before their full disability payments begin to flow.

Is American Becoming an Authoritarian or Fascist State? 

Republican Congressman Says Totalitarian Regime a Danger

Former Republican Congressman and CIA official Bob Barr says that there is a danger recent developments describe a trend of America slipping into a totalitarian society and that the Bush administration are doing everything in their power to see that this happens.

Gen. Franks Doubts Constitution Will Survive WMD Attack

General Tommy Franks (the general who led the Iraq invasion) says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government.

More Websites and Articles on the "War on Terror" 

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

Daily commentaries on developments in the War on Terror.

The Results of 'War on Terror' 

Is the War on Terror stopping terrorism or causing it?

US 'war on terror' backfiring, says thinktank

The US "war on terror" has backfired, strengthening extremists in Afghanistan and Somalia and turning them into legitimate political actors in the eyes of their local populations, a thinktank said today.

The "War on Terror" is also a war on us

We delude ourselves when we think that what is happening will just magically 'go away' with the next president. We delude ourselves when we think that an election is the cure for what ails us. We delude ourselves when we deny our own individual responsibility in changing the trajectory of where our country is headed. We delude ourselves when we think that nothing can be done to stop what is happening. We delude ourselves when we think that the 'War on Terror' is only a war on evil crazy terrorists.