WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 – Many of the new, more sophisticated roadside bombs used to attack American and government forces in Iraq have been designed in Iran and shipped in from there, United States military and intelligence officials said Friday, raising the prospect of increased foreign help for Iraqi insurgents.

American commanders say the deadlier bombs could become more common as insurgent bomb makers learn the techniques to make the weapons themselves in Iraq.

But just as troubling is that the spread of the new weapons seems to suggest a new and unusual area of cooperation between Iranian Shiites and Iraqi Sunnis to drive American forces out – a possibility that the commanders said they could make little sense of given the increasing violence between the sects in Iraq.

Unlike the improvised explosive devices devised from Iraq’s vast stockpiles of missiles, artillery shells and other arms, the new weapons are specially designed to destroy armored vehicles, military bomb experts say. The bombs feature shaped charges, which penetrate armor by focusing explosive power in a single direction and by firing a metal projectile embedded in the device into the target at high speed. The design is crude but effective if the vehicle’s armor plating is struck at the correct angle, the experts said.

Since they first began appearing about two months ago, some of these devices have been seized, including one large shipment that was captured last week in northeast Iraq coming from Iran. But one senior military officer said “tens” of the devices had been smuggled in and used against allied forces, killing or wounding several Americans throughout Iraq in the past several weeks.

“These are among the most sophisticated and most lethal devices we’ve seen,” said the senior officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicate intelligence reports describing the bombs. “It’s very serious.”

Pentagon and intelligence officials say that some shipments of the new explosives have contained both components and fully manufactured devices, and may have been spirited into Iraq along the porous Iranian border by the Iranian-backed, anti-Israeli terrorist group Hezbollah, or by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. American commanders say these bombs closely matched those that Hezbollah has used against Israel.

…American officials say they have no evidence that the Iranian government is involved. But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the new United States ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, complained publicly this week about the Tehran government’s harmful meddling in Iraqi affairs.

“There is movement across its borders of people and matériel used in violent acts against Iraq,” Mr. Khalilzad said Monday.

But some Middle East specialists discount any involvement by the Iranian government or Hezbollah, saying it would be counter to their interests to support Iraq’s Sunni Arab insurgents, who have stepped up their attacks against Iraqi Shiites. These specialists suggest that the arms shipments are more likely the work of criminals, arms traffickers or splinter insurgent groups.

“Iran’s protégés are in control in Iraq right now, yet these weapons are going to people fighting Iran’s protégés,” said Kenneth Katzman, a Persian Gulf expert at the Congressional Research Service and a former Middle East analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. “That makes little sense to me.”
Full: nytimes.com

It doesn’t take great sophistication to come up with armor-penetrating missiles, all you do is change their shape. Whatever crap this article is trying to put forth, the important piece is that Shi’ites and Sunnis are working together, as Iraqis, to force the US out.

ALMATY/MOSCOW, Aug 5 (Reuters) – Bird flu has been officially confirmed in two more Russian regions, and the disease may also be spreading in Northern Kazakhstan, officials said on Friday.

Health officials fear that a subtype of bird flu dangerous to humans may mutate into a lethal strain that could rival or exceed the Spanish flu pandemic that killed 20-40 million people worldwide at the end of World War One.
Full: cnn.netscape.cnn.com

“The dust hadn’t even settled after the terrorist atrocities in London and already the conspiracy theories…had begun,” writes Cinnamon Stillwell in “The London Conspiracy Theories: Here We Go Again.” Nevermind that settled dust also covers tracks, as unpolished first reports get squeegee’d from the record. And disregard the fact that every reconstruction of the events must posit a conspiracy of some sort, and that they are not even theories, but hypotheses.

Nevermind all that, as here they go again, baiting the genuine skeptics in the Aeon of Bizarro.

Most irksome are Stillwell’s patronizing conclusions:

“It never ceases to amaze me how many well-educated, otherwise rational people insist on pushing these fantasies. Unable to cope with the nihilistic and horrifying threat of Islamic terrorism, they instead turn to familiar demons…. How long these people can continue their delusions is unknown, but something tells me that a great number of them will simply have to be written off as functionally insane while the rest of us attend to the business of fighting Islamic terrorism.

In some ways I understand this need to find more comforting answers. There’s been many a day since 9/11 that I’ve wished this threat wasn’t real. But it is. At some point, all of us will have to shake off the conspiracy theories and face that truth.”

I don’t mind so much being dismissed as mad, so long as I’m not locked up in a psychiatric hospital for the politically insane. Though since that day came for Soviet dissidents, and the Western calender is running just a little behind, we shouldn’t be surprised if our questions will eventually be addressed with a pharmacological magic bullet. Rather, what I find most disagreeable about this popular refutation of “conspiracy theory” is that such thinking is somehow comforting.

Tell me what I say is crazy, without bothering to hear what I’m saying. I’m fine with that. Hell, I listen to what I’m saying and sometimes I wonder myself. As a fellow “conspiracy theorist” recently told me, “I feel like the guy in A Beautiful Mind, minus the genius part.” Adding things up which are not to be added can do that to you. It’s a crazy-making world out there, once you start paying attention to it. Just don’t presume to tell me how I feel about it.

And I won’t presume to tell you, so you tell me: how did you feel when the floor first fell away from beneath you? When the comforting assumptions of consensus reality folded up upon themselves, and you saw the lone gunmen as cardbard figures, and you glimpsed the grinning skulls beneath the smooth skin of the killers, what did that do to your insides? When you felt the vertiginous drop, did you throw up your hands and let out a “Wheeeeee!”?
Full: rigorousintuition.com

…I’m London-born to Jamaican parents, and like most people I want to stay alive while travelling around my home city. Easier said than done now that terrorists are blowing up buses and tubes, and police have killed a dark-skinned man they thought was on the verge of an atrocity.

Up until Jean Charles de Menezes was shot in Stockwell, I was scared of the explosions. Now there’s a double whammy. Do I worry about the Asian with the backpack or the nonchalant white guy?

“De Menezes acted suspiciously by running” is one line that’s wheeled out to abrogate responsibility for a catastrophe. But if you’re in an ethnic minority the errors seem to hit you thick and fast throughout your life. It really doesn’t take that much for a police officer to be suspicious.

I remember Doreen Lawrence telling me that police initially treated her and her husband Neville like they were the criminals after their aspiring architect of a son had been stabbed to death by white racists at a bus stop in south-east London. In 1993 she had to grieve through the bigotry, but the bungled investigation into Stephen’s murder forced the Macpherson report, which among other things highlighted the institutional racism within police forces. And to their credit the police have moved to eradicate that blight.

So far I’ve evaded the racist thugs at the bus stops, but I haven’t eluded the institutionalised stupidity. Like countless other law-abiding black men in the capital, I’ve been stopped, questioned and searched by police professing to be doing their utmost to protect the community. When I owned a Golf convertible I’d be tailed or pulled over for driving what they suspected to be a stolen car.

While trying to catch the last bus home from the City a few years back I was stopped by an officer who told me that I was acting suspiciously by running through a high-risk burglary area with a holdall. He looked through the bag, asked me whether the shoes and clothes were mine, and then wanted to know where I’d come from. When I told him the Guardian in Farringdon Road, he asked if I could prove it. I showed him my press card and I thought that would be the end of it.

Wrong. He asked where I lived, and even though the address tallied with the bus that I’d been running to catch, he still radioed my details through. When these were confirmed, the officer’s explanation was that he had a job to do, and was sure I’d understand. I was livid because I had understood.

Now what frightens me is that, unlike the Lawrences, the grief of the De Menezes family seems not to be yielding anything positive. The Met commissioner apologises but says police may have to shoot other innocent people to protect the community. And their colour will be … ?
Full: countercurrents.org

…The crash, which came just three weeks after Mr Garang was sworn in as Sudan’s vice-president under the peace settlement, has aroused suspicions, particularly among his supporters in the south.

Yesterday, the southern town of Juba also saw violence, as Arab northerners were hounded out of town by rampaging locals. Aid workers said at least 18 people had been killed in the area during the past two days. A further 84 have died in the Khartoum violence.

“Peace is being jeopardised in the short run,” said the top UN envoy in Sudan, Jan Pronk.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Speech to the “Out of Iraq” Congressional Caucus on July 19, 2005
…At that moment I knew it was going to be a very long deployment. I realized that I was not being greeted as a liberator. I became overwhelmed with fear because I felt I never would be viewed that way by the Iraqi people. As a soldier this concerned me. Because if they did not view me as a liberator, then what did they view me as? I felt that they viewed me as foreign occupier of their land. That led me to believe very early on that I was going to have a fight on my hands.

During my year in Iraq I had many altercations with the so-called “insurgency.” I found the insurgency I saw to be quite different from the insurgency described to the American people by the Bush Administration, the media, and other supporters of the war. There is no doubt in my mind there are foreigners from other surrounding countries in Iraq. Anyone in the Middle East who hates America now has the opportunity to kill Americans because there are roughly 140,000 US troops in Iraq. But the bulk of the insurgency I faced was primarily the people of Iraq who were attacking us as a reaction to what they felt was an occupation of their country.

I was engaged actively in urban combat in the Abu Ghraib area west of Baghdad. Many of the people who were attacking me were the poor people of Iraq. They were definitely not members of Al Qaeda, left over Baath Party members, and they were not former members of Saddam’s regime. They were just your average Iraqi civilian who wanted us out of their country.

…we were being told that in order for us to get out of Iraq completely the Iraqi military would have to be able to take over all security operations. The training of the Iraqi Army became a huge concern of mine. During the time I trained! them, their basic training was only one week long. We showed them some basic drill and ceremony such as marching and saluting. When it came time for weapons training, we gave each Iraqi recruit an AK-47 and just let them shoot it. They did not even have to qualify by hitting a target. All they had to do was pull the trigger. I was instructed by my superiors to stand directly behind them with caution while they were shooting just in case they tried to turn the weapon on us so we could stop them.

Once they graduated from basic training, the Iraqi soldiers in a way became part of our battalion and we would take them on missions with us. But we never let them know where we were going, because we were afraid some of them might tip off the insurgency that we were coming and we would walk directly into an ambush. When they would get into formation prior to the missions we made them a part of, they would cover their faces so the people of their communities did not identify them as being affiliated with the American troops.

Not that long ago President Bush made a statement at Fort Bragg when he addressed the nation about the war in Iraq. He said we would “stand down” when the Iraqi military is ready to “stand up.” My experience with the new Iraqi military tells me we won’t be coming home for a long time if that’s the case.
Full: informationclearinghouse.info

NEW YORK (AP) – The suicide bombers cooked up their explosives using mundane items like hydrogen peroxide. They stored them in a fancy commercial refrigerator that was out of place in their grimy apartment. And cell phones were likely used to set the bombs off.

Those details from the July 7 London bombing emerged Wednesday at an unusually wide-ranging briefing given by the New York Police Department to city business leaders.

The briefing – based partly on information obtained by NYPD detectives who were dispatched to London to monitor the investigation – was part of a program designed to encourage more vigilance by private security at large hotels, Wall Street firms, storage facilities and other companies.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly warned the materials and methods used in the London attack were easily adaptable to New York.

“Initially it was thought that perhaps the materials were high-end military explosives that were smuggled, but it turns out not to be the case,” Kelly said. “It’s more like these terrorists went to a hardware store or some beauty supply store.”

The NYPD officials said investigators believe the bombers used a peroxide-based explosive called HMDT, or hexamethylene triperoxide diamine. HMDT can be made using ordinary ingredients like hydrogen peroxide (hair bleach), citric acid (a common food preservative) and heat tablets (sometimes used by the military for cooking).
Full: guardian.co.uk

You’d think one of the simplest things to determine would be what the bombs were made of. This is the third change of story. And the fact that it’s the NYPD saying this…weird.

THOUSANDS of investors joined sharp institutions in making millions of pounds from the short-lived collapse in share prices that followed the terrorist strikes in London last week.

It was the busiest day of trading for over two years. The London Stock Exchange said 4.75 billion shares were traded on Thursday compared with the recent daily average of about 3.1 billion.
BP and Vodafone were among Britain’s largest companies that took advantage of the volatile markets to improve their balance sheets.

Financial spread-betting firm City Index said more than 8000 retail investors had dived into the market on Thursday, correctly backing their hunch that share prices would quickly bounce back.

Some will find profiteering from horror distasteful. But many in the City applauded the resilience of capitalism.
Full: finance.news.com

by Tim Wise
Growing up in the South, I often heard folks criticize others for being “common.” To be called common was to be vilified as trashy and unworthy of respect. Putting aside the elitist implications of such a slur, the pejorative nature of the term has always stuck with me, so much so that when I hear something described as “common sense,” I instinctively assume that while it may indeed be the former, it is rarely ever the latter.

There is no better example of this truism than with the desire of so many to endorse racial and religious profiling of Arabs and Muslims so as to thwart terrorist attacks. In the wake of the London subway bombings, the call for profiling is being heard once again (as it was after 9/11), and once again those proposing such measures are cloaking their demands in the garb of “common sense,” while mocking as politically correct fools, anyone who dares criticize the idea.
Full: counterpunch.org

As Tim Wise points out, ‘dedicated terrorists’ will always find a way, profiling or not. But the other weird angle of this is the obssession with ‘safety.’ The only way a government can provide some measure of safety to its people is to pursue humane policies. The same people who are making it unsafe for everybody are in charge of ‘homeland security.’
Ha.Right now, the least ‘safe’ people in the Western world are young men with dark skin.

Safe

In Washington it is hardly a secret that the same people in and around the administration who brought you Iraq are preparing to do the same for Iran. The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing—that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack—but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.
* * *
There is increasing evidence that the Iraqi police forces, now under Shi’ite control, are carrying out systematic revenge killings against Sunnis in Baghdad. The bodies now showing up at the morgue have obvious signs of handcuffing and blindfolding and evidence of being tortured before death. U.S. sources indicate that the suspicious killings have reached the rate of almost 700 per month. The police are supervised by the Shi’ite-run Ministry of Interior, which claims that the killings are being carried out by insurgents wearing stolen police uniforms. But American intelligence sources disagree, noting that many of the killers appear to be actual policemen carrying the expensive standard-issue Glock automatics and driving official Toyota Land Cruisers.
Full: amconmag.com

Strange days indeed when Pat Buchanan’s mag is the voice of truth and reason in the U.S. True conservatives are as appalled by fascistic policies at home and abroad as the rest of us are.