Home
Tamer Mowafy's Library tagged → View Popular, Search in Google
Thousands of field reports filed by private security contractors operating in Iraq have been made available to the public for the first time.
-
Contractors from Blackwater, one of the first private security firms to work in Iraq after the US-led takeover, feature heavily in the reports. The firm has faced heavy criticism for its role in a number of shootings, most notably the killing of 14 Iraqi civilians after Blackwater guards opened fire in Nisoor Square, Baghdad, while escorting an American diplomatic envoy.
Say goodbye to Xe. The company formerly known as Blackwater — the world’s most infamous private security corporation — has jettisoned the name it chose in its 2009 rebrand. Now the “security solutions provider” wants to wash away the taint of the 2007 Nisour Square shootings by adopting the new name “Academi.”
U.S. Marines fire Nov. 11, 2004, on Fallujah with a 155 mm Howitzer. One of the weapons originally designed for this artillery piece was a tactical nuclear weapon (that could include a neutron warhead) designed by Samuel Cohen, to be fired in eastern Europe on Soviet troops during President Ronald Reagan’s term in office.
"Susan Lindauer’s piece of the 9/11 puzzle adds more evidence to support the charge of criminal negligence at the command level and exposes the utter depravity of the Patriot Act."
"As revealed by a State Department diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks last week, US forces committed a heinous war crime during a house raid in Iraq in 2006, wherein one man, four women, two children, and three infants were summarily executed."
BP has been accused of taking a "stranglehold" on the Iraqi economy after the Baghdad government agreed to pay the British firm even when oil is not being produced by the Rumaila field, confidential documents reveal
"On 9 April 2003, American tanks rolled into Baghdad, 21 days after war was declared by the West on Sadam Hussein's Iraq. "
New documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union show "unjustified homicide" of detainees and concerns about the condition of confinement in U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, according to the ACLU.
-
Among the documents are autopsy reports and military investigations, including 25 to 30 cases the ACLU says it believes are "unjustified homicide." Some of the homicides in the documents are widely known and have been reported in the media, such as the case of four Iraqi detainees executed by a group of U.S. soldiers and then pushed into a Baghdad canal in 2007.
-
Others are thought by the ACLU to be new. In one such case, a detainee was killed by an unnamed sergeant who walked into a room where the detainee was lying wounded "and assaulted him ... then shot him twice thus killing him," one of the investigating documents says. The sergeant than instructed the other soldiers present to lie about the incident. Later, the document says an unnamed corporal then shot the deceased detainee in the head after finding his corpse.
Soon, we will witness the 20th anniversary of the start of the first Gulf War. When the first bomb fell on Iraq at 2:00 a.m. on January 17, 1991, the United States began the military implementation of years of deceit and dirty tricks to attain a permanent foothold in the Middle East.
Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American political figure who returned to Iraq this week from self-imposed exile, told tens of thousands of his followers Saturday to "resist" and "disturb" the United States.
Wikileaks has shown that our government and military form a 'vast lying machine' that perpetrates mass murder in our name.
-
The chilling fact is this: whether you believe that September 11, 2001 was due to incomprehensible fanaticism or genuine grievances, it seems likely that U.S. leaders’ murder of countless Muslims since 2001 will cause the next 9/11 should, God forbid, it occur,
"The use of contractors could become a serious problem if controversies about them are not addressed, a senior British official warned during a recent visit to Washington."
-
The Pentagon's Central Command had nearly 225,000 contractors working in Iraq and Afghanistan and other areas at last count, doing tasks ranging from providing security to base support. Intelligence agencies such as the CIA and the National Security Agency field thousands more under classified contracts that are not publicly disclosed, but extend into every U.S. military command around the world.
"The US energy firm Chevron negotiated with Tehran about developing an Iraq-Iran cross-border oilfield in spite of tight US sanctions, according to the Iraqi prime minister in leaked diplomatic cables."
-
Nouri al-Maliki's claim, reported in the cables, that Chevron was in discussions with the Iranian government will raise eyebrows in Europe and other parts of the world where international companies have come under significant pressure from Washington to end investments and other financial dealings with Tehran.
-
According to the cable, Maliki asked "about the political feasibility of such a deal involving a US firm working both sides of a cross-border field, given current USG [United States government] policies toward Iran".
- 1 more annotation(s)...
"The security company formerly known as Blackwater has told a US federal judge that the US government, and not the company itself, should be held accountable for a 2007 shooting by its contractors that killed 17 Iraqis in Nisour Square in Baghdad."
-
attorney Andrew Pincus argued the sensitive nature of providing security in a war zone required the kind of oversight the government normally reserves for its own employees, as opposed to the duties performed by other types of contractors.
-
Lawyers for both the plaintiffs and the government disputed the contractors' argument, saying the practical effect of transferring the focus of the lawsuit to the federal government would be its dismissal.
- 5 more annotation(s)...
"The Chinese dissident has praised the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan – and said China should be fully westernised"
"Turkish clothing and beer are hot sellers on the streets of Arbil, the capital of Iraq's Kurdish north. Far to the south, Iranian cars roam the streets of Basra and Iranian pilgrims flock to Iraq's holy sites."
-
Already one of Iraq's main trade partners, Turkey hopes to gain a bigger foothold in its southern neighbor's economy through increased investment, in order to counter Iran's growing influence and to boost its stature as a regional economic and political power.
-
Iran is Iraq's main trading partner and has been one of the largest investors in its construction and industrial sectors since the fall of Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein.
- 2 more annotation(s)...
the new film Fair Game, the story of how CIA agent Valerie Plame was outed by the Bush administration by way of discrediting her husband Joe Wilson’s public contradiction of one of the administration’s multiple false claims on Iraqi WMD
"Recently declassified Pentagon documents reveal a strange, not to say illicit, 1980s operation called 'Tipped Kettle,' in which weapons stolen by Israel from the PLO in Lebanon were transferred to the Contras and to anti-American elements in Iran"
"Several of the documents set to be published by WikiLeaks this weekend are believed to show the US has been helping Turkey's Kurdish separatist movement the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers Party. "
-
Another document is believed to charge Turkey with providing indirect assistance to al-Qaeda. It is believed the document will say Turkey rendered this assistance by failing to control the movement of people across its border with Iraq
-
WikiLeaks is planning to publish up to 400,000 sensitive cables from the past five years that include media reports, talks with politicians, government officials and journalists, and evaluations and various analyses by American diplomats regarding their host countries.
"US diplomatic cables set for imminent release by WikiLeaks will reportedly show that NATO ally Turkey aided Al Qaeda in Iraq, while the US supported the PKK, a Kurdish separatist group fighting Turkey."
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Top Contributors
Groups interested in iraq
-
Constitutions/ Various Nations
This list contains constitut...
Items: 22 | Visits: 377
Created by: liveinfreedom .
-
1998 Clinton's WMD and "Iraqi Liberation Act" 1998
America's congress passed th...
Items: 12 | Visits: 359
Created by: liveinfreedom .
-
IRAQ Improvements
Follow Iraq developments here.
Items: 133 | Visits: 1911
Created by: liveinfreedom .
Highlighter, Sticky notes, Tagging, Groups and Network: integrated suite dramatically boosting research productivity. Learn more »
Join Diigo