The Death Squads - Google Video

The torture and slaughter of Iraqi civilians is reaching unprecedented heights with estimates of up to 655,000 dead.

Night after night … all » death squads rampage through Iraq’s main cities. In Baghdad, up to a hundred bodies a day are dumped on the streets. Often they’ve been tortured with electric drills. Yet those doing the killing have little to do with al Qaeda or Sunni insurgents. The majority of the killings are carried out by Shia death squads who want to turn Iraq into a Shia state aligned to Iran.

This shocking film investigates the links between the death squads and high-ranking Shia politicians. It reveals how the Shia militia that these politicians control have systematically infiltrated and taken over police units and even entire government ministeries. It investigates how these units are closely linked to the death squads, indeed they often are the death squads. And the killers act with impunity — there’s little investigation into their activities.

Dr Temple Grandin has a legendary ability to read the animal mind and understand animal behaviour when no one else can. But this is no feat of telepathy; her explanation is simple. She’s convinced she experiences the world much as an animal does and that it’s all down to her autistic brain.

In this half-hour film, Greg Palast and his team travel to New Orleans to investigate what has happened since Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast last year. On his visit, he discovers that the population of New Orleans is miniscule, the reconstruction sparse, suicide rates are climbing, and many have not, nor know how to, return to the city that care forgot. He examines why residents had to leave, what really caused the flood and why they aren’t returning.

Bonus Features Include: Tomorrow’s New Orleans - Whose City Will it Be? A half-hour conversation with Amy Goodman and Greg Palast where they sit down to discuss who is accountable for the ongoing disastrous situation in New Orleans.

�??Oil, Smoke & Mirrors�?? offers a bleaker view of present global circumstances than many of us would dare consider. It deals with issues that are largely marginalized, if not ignored, in the discourse of mainstream media and politics.

However, as the film argues, it may well be that mediated political culture itself which, by sidelining some of the most challenging questions of historical truth in our time, poses the gravest threat to our future.

�??Oil, Smoke & Mirrors�?? is an independent production. The producer has neither association with, nor membership of, any political organization.

Jamming

Deep lines criss-crossed his narrow forehead and his eyes half closed when he tried to answer a question He seemed to evaluate every answer before he spoke. He claimed involvement in dozens of attacks on US and Iraqi troops, mostly IEDs (bombs) but also ambushes and execution of alleged Shia spies. “We have stopped using remote controls to detonate IEDs,” he volunteered halfway through our conversation. “Only wires work now because the Americans are jamming the signals.”

On his mobile phone he proudly showed me grainy images of dead bodies lying in the street, their hands tied behind their backs . He claimed they were Shia agents and that he had killed them. “There is a new jihad now,” he said, echoing Abu Omar’s warning. “The jihad now is against the Shia, not the Americans.”

In Ramadi there was still jihad against the Americans because there were no Shia to fight, but in Baghdad his group only attacked the Americans if they were with Shia army forces or were coming to arrest someone.

“We have been deceived by the jihadi Arabs,” he admitted, in reference to al-Qaida and foreign fighters. “They had an international agenda and we implemented it. But now all the leadership of the jihad in Iraq are Iraqis.”

Abu Aisha went on to describe how the Sunnis were reorganising. After Sunni families had been expelled from mixed areas throughout Baghdad, his area in the western suburbs was prepared to defend itself against any militia attack.

“Ameriya, Jihad, Ghazaliyah,” he listed, “all these areas are becoming part of the new Islamic state of Iraq, each with an emir in charge.” Increasingly the Iraqi insurgency is moving away from its cellular structure and becoming organised according to neighbourhood. Local defence committees have intertwined into the insurgent movement.

“Each group is in charge of a specific street,” Abu Aisha said. “We have defence lines, trenches and booby traps. When the Americans arrive we let them go through, but if they show up with Iraqi troops, then it’s a fight.”

December 22, 2006The Butt-Stroke Mentality
By April Rabkin

MJ: What are other ways to manipulate public opinion?

RS: Since I’ve been home, I still constantly monitor the news from Afghanistan and Iraq. Everyday I get the casualty lists. The thing that’s startling is that they’re masking the casualties, the cost of the war in Afghanistan. Iraq is bad enough, but Afghanistan �?? that was supposed to be the shining jewel of the war on terror. We went in kicked out the bad guys and set up a democracy and everything’s gonna be fine now.

MJ: What? Masking the casualties? I’ve never heard this before.

RS: It’s a public relations tactic. A news cycle lasts 48 to 72 hours. Say Johnny Smith from New Haven, Conn., is in Kunar Province where his American infantry battalion is operating. He’s in a fight with local insurgents �?? not Osama bin Laden, maybe some foreign fighters, but mostly local. Johnny Smith dies in combat. Within 24 hours there’s a news release that comes out of this island we call Kabul that says a coalition soldier was killed in Afghanistan today. We’re not going to give out his name because we’re going to say, “The next of kin have to be notified.” We’re not going to give out his nationality because we’re all part of this quote “coalition.”

But here’s the sad fact: 99.99 % of coalition forces in Kunar are in fact American. So now in the news �?? NBC news, national news, wire services �?? the only thing that’s released is that a “coalition” soldier was killed in Afghanistan today.

And 72 hours later when the DOD finally releases Private Johnny Smith’s name, the New Haven Register and Channel 8 will pick up the memorial service and how sad Johnny’s family is. But in San Francisco, they never hear about it. In Minnesota, they never hear about it. In Florida, they never hear about it. It’s a very clever public affairs strategy. Now we have NATO in Afghanistan, so it’s, “A NATO soldier died.”

Afghan mess-up: Crossed signals lead each side to mistake the other for enemy

DARNAMI, Afghanistan (AP) - When blasts of gunfire woke Mohammad Shafik at 1 a.m., he was sure the attackers were Taliban or al-Qaida, out to punish his family for its close ties with the Afghan government.

Huddled with nine close relatives in their mud-brick compound in eastern Khost province, he heard a man with an accent from the southern city Kandahar - the Taliban’s former stronghold - order them to step into the icy winter night.

“Come out and be safe,” the man said.

Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives - No New Year�??s hangover for top CEOs

TORONTO - By 12:13 pm on New Year’s Day, while many Canadians were still nursing a hangover, Canada”s 100 highest paid CEOs had already pocketed what will take minimum wage workers the rest of 2007 to earn.

The clock keeps ticking. By 9:46 am Jan. 2, as most Canadians begin another year of labour, Canada�??s 100 highest paid CEOs will have reaped, on average, $38,010 in pay.

“That equals the average annual earnings of workers in Canada,�?? says Hugh Mackenzie, research associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA). �??And it will take them all of 2007 to earn it.�??

By the time Canadians tune into the 6:00 news Jan. 2, Canada�??s 100 highest paid CEOs will have pocketed nearly $70,000. The highest paid CEO will have pocketed more than $570,000.

�??If time is money, are Canada�??s 100 highest paid CEOs really worth more in a day than most Canadian workers are in a year?�?? asks Mackenzie.

�??People wonder what the growing gap between the rich and the rest of us looks like. This provides us with a pretty good snapshot of how unevenly the Canadian workforce is valued these days.�??

Below is a complete listing of the articles in “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic,” a series by Coby Beck containing responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. There are four separate taxonomies; arguments are divided by:

* Stages of Denial,
* Scientific Topics,
* Types of Argument, and
* Levels of Sophistication.

How the anti-copyright lobby makes big business richer | The Register
By Sion Touhig
Published Friday 29th December 2006 10:24 GMT

Comment We’re continually being told the Internet empowers the individual. But speaking as an individual creative worker myself, I’d argue that all this Utopian revolution has achieved so far in my sector is to disempower individuals, strengthen the hand of multinational businesses, and decrease the pool of information available to audiences. All things that the technology utopians say they wanted to avoid.

I’m a freelance professional photographer, and in recent years, the internet ‘economy’ has devastated my sector. It’s now difficult to make a viable living due to widespread copyright theft from newspapers, media groups, individuals and a glut of images freely or cheaply available on the Web.

8. “Iraq is the central front in the war on terror.” From the beginning of history until 2003 there had never been a suicide bombing in Iraq. There was no al-Qaeda in Baath-ruled Iraq. When Baath intelligence heard that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi might have entered Iraq, they grew alarmed at such an “al-Qaeda” presence and put out an APB on him! Zarqawi’s so-called “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia” was never “central” in Iraq and was never responsible for more than a fraction of the violent attacks. This assertion is supported by the outcome of a US-Jordanian operation that killed Zarqawi this year. His death had no impact whatsoever on the level of violence. There are probably only about 1,000 foreign fighters even in Iraq, and most of them are first-time volunteers, not old-time terrorists. The 50 major guerrilla cells in Sunni Arab Iraq are mostly made up of Iraqis, and are mainly: 1) Baathist or neo-Baathist, 2) Sunni revivalist or Salafi, 3) tribally-based, or 4) based in city quarters. Al-Qaeda is mainly a boogey man, invoked in Iraq on all sides, but possessing little real power or presence there. This is not to deny that radical Sunni Arab volunteers come to Iraq to blow things (and often themselves) up. They just are not more than an auxiliary to the big movements, which are Iraqi.