WASHINGTON (AFP) – One day before Iraq’s historic parliamentary elections, US President George W. Bush defended his decision to invade that country and reserved the right to preemptive war in the future.

“In an age of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, if we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long,” he said in a speech aimed at shoring up flagging US support for the conflict.

…Bush acknowledged that the war had sharply divided the United States and that intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons programs had turned out to be false, but he sharply rebuked “irresponsible” charges that he had deliberately misled the country.

“These charges are pure politics. They hurt the morale of our troops,” he declared, saying that even countries which opposed the war agreed that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.

But US media have quoted French and German intelligence officials in recent weeks as saying that they repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, warned Washington that crucial parts of its case for war were flawed or outright false.

German intelligence officials warned their US counterparts that accounts from an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, a critical US source for charges that Iraq possessed mobile germ weapons labs, could not be confirmed and, in many cases, were deeply suspect, The Los Angeles Times reported in November.

The same daily quoted a former senior French intelligence official on Sunday as saying that Paris tried for months to warn the CIA that there was no evidence to support a US allegation that Iraq had tried to purchase nuclear weapons material in Africa.
news.yahoo.com

Saddam’s WMD Moved to Syria, An Israeli Says

Saddam Hussein moved his chemical weapons to Syria six weeks before the war started, Israel’s top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom says.

The assertion comes as President Bush said yesterday that much of the intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was incorrect.

The Israeli officer, Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, asserted that Saddam spirited his chemical weapons out of the country on the eve of the war. “He transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria,” General Yaalon told The New York Sun over dinner in New York on Tuesday night. “No one went to Syria to find it.”

Egypt says US ignores offer to train Iraqi troops

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Egypt has repeatedly offered to train tens of thousands of Iraqi forces but Washington ignored this offer and chose instead to criticize Cairo for not doing enough, Egypt’s envoy to the United States said.

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The United States has consistently accused Arab countries, including Egypt, of not doing enough to stabilize and rebuild Iraq, but Egyptian Ambassador Nabil Fahmy said on Thursday this criticism was unfounded.

“We have offered to train Iraqis for over two years,” he told reporters at a breakfast at his residence.

Fahmy said he offered Egypt’s help in troop training during discussions with officials from the Pentagon, the State Department and members of Congress but they gave no response.

“It’s got to the point that I have stopped begging,” he said. “It’s mind-boggling,” he added.

…ANGELA DAVIS: Well, it seems to me that we saw a very intentional politicization of this process, namely the equation of what Schwarzenegger would call lawlessness and criminality with radical political activism. It is revealing, it seems to me, that every single name he evoked by quoting the dedication from Tookie’s autobiography, every single name is the name of a person of color, a black person or a Native person, and of course we have Nelson Mandela, who is a global hero, who represents to us the determination to dismantle racism and sexism and economic exploitation.

It is very frightening to me that Schwarzenegger would make such a statement, particularly in light of the assault on people’s rights associated with the PATRIOT Act. This feels like an even more intense kind of McCarthyism that’s happening here, and it was particularly ironic that he said that Williams is not reformed and he still sees violence and lawlessness as legitimate, as what he called a legitimate means to address societal problems. This is ironic, since Stanley Tookie Williams has publicly embraced nonviolence, and as I said this evening, when I spoke at the rally, this execution is the most outrageous example of using violence, of using state violence as a legitimate means of addressing social problems.
democracynow.org

Key commission member recommends returning some areas to wetland

A key member of the commission charged with overseeing the rebuilding of New Orleans partially endorsed a proposal to shrink the city’s footprint, but pulled back from a recommendation to temporarily ban development in some of the neighborhoods hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina, according to the city’s Times-Picayune newspaper.

Joe Canizaro, co-chairman of the city’s Bring Back New Orleans planning subcommittee, said he and other commission members agree with a recommendation from the Urban Land Institute that some areas of the city should be returned to wetland, according to the newspaper. The ULI proposal would require environmental tests and hurricane-protection studies before allowing development in some neighborhoods, including the Lower 9th Ward.

Canizaro’s plan would allow residents to rebuild in any part of the city for the next three years. “If a neighborhood is not developing adequately to support the services it needs to support it, we’ll try to shrink it then,” Canizaro told the paper. “I don’t envision the elimination of neighborhoods, I see the shrinkage of neighborhoods,” Canizaro said. The city would have the power to condemn property in areas that have failed to develop sufficiently to support the neighborhoods.
msnbc.msn.com

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) — A dozen years after former President Clinton ordered the government to attack environmental injustices, black and poor Americans still are far more likely to breathe factory pollution that poses the greatest health risk, an Associated Press analysis found.

The AP analysis of government pollution, health and census data found that blacks are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in neighborhoods where industrial air pollution is suspected of causing the most health problems.

Residents in neighborhoods with the highest pollution health risk also tend to be poorer, less educated and more often unemployed than those elsewhere in the country, AP found.

“Poor communities, frequently communities of color but not exclusively, suffer disproportionately,” said Carol Browner, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton administration when the scoring system was developed. “If you look at where our industrialized facilities tend to be located, they’re not in the upper middle class neighborhoods.”
cnn.com

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – The head of Iraq’s border guards denied police reports on Wednesday that a tanker truck stuffed with thousands of forged ballot papers had been seized crossing into Iraq from Iran before Thursday’s elections.

“This is all a lie,” said Lieutenant General Ahmed al- Khafaji, the chief of the U.S.-trained force which has responsibility for all Iraqi borders.

“I heard this yesterday and I checked all the border crossings right away. The borders are all closed anyway,” he told Reuters. Iraq’s frontiers are closed for the period of the election.

“I contacted all the border crossing points and there was no report of any such incident.”
turkishweekly.net

NY Times: Police Seize Forged Ballots Headed to Iraq From Iran

The entire US-controlled political process this year—the January 30 elections for a transitional government, the drafting of a new constitution and the referendum on October 15—has been aimed at giving the veneer of legal legitimacy to the plunder of the country’s oil and gas and the formation of a puppet government that will sanction an indefinite US military presence in Iraq.

This week’s ballot is the final stage. At stake are 275 seats in the next parliament, which will sit for the next four years and elect both the president and prime minister. Each of the country’s 18 provinces has been allocated a number of seats based on population. Baghdad, for example, the most populated province, will elect 59 parliamentarians. A total of 230 will be elected in the provinces. The remaining 45 will be chosen by a national proportional method.

Even if it wanted to, the new government would have next to no ability to reverse what the US invasion and occupation has already set in motion. Iraq’s economy is devastated, with unemployment close to 50 percent, growing malnutrition, dysfunctional social services and rampant corruption. The new constitution has already placed new oil developments under the control of regional or provincial governments, which have the power to sign long-term contracts with transnational companies.

To enforce this framework, the US military and the Iraqi security forces are conducting bloody operations in areas where guerilla resistance groups are active, at the cost of hundreds of lives each month. While there is talk of withdrawing up to 20,000 American troops next year, the foreign occupation force in Iraq will remain well over 100,000 for the foreseeable future.
wsws.org

We Vote, Then We Throw You Out

12/14/05 “Asia Times” — — First, a quick look at the environment ahead of Thursday’s elections in Iraq. Political assassinations, party headquarters burned, abductions (all largely unreported by Western corporate media). A former prime minister, Iyad Allawi – widely known in Baghdad as “Saddam without a moustache” – saying on the record that human rights in President George W Bush’s Iraq are worse than they were under Saddam.

Current Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari’s Da’wa Party accusing Allawi of defending the occupiers. Allawi accusing Jaafari’s government of corruption. Former Pentagon asset Ahmad Chalabi’s campaign posters with the inscription, “We liberated Iraq.”

A network of secret torture prisons and charnel houses. Fear and loathing in militia hell. American military operations to “secure peaceful voting”. All traffic circulation prohibited by the occupiers (to prevent car bombings). The borders with both Syria and Jordan, as well as Baghdad’s airport, all closed.

Satanic, free and fair

We all knew what some were going to say. Saddam Hussein – preparing his next coup de theater in court – declared the elections “a farce”. Al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers, plus four other jihadi groups, denounced them as “a satanic project”, vowing to perpetuate the jihad, fighting for “an Islamic state ruled by the book [the Koran] and the traditions of Prophet Mohammed”.

Dec. 14 (Bloomberg) — President George W. Bush accepted responsibility for taking the U.S. to war in Iraq based on faulty intelligence while saying the invasion still was justified by the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and international terrorism.

“It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong,” Bush said today in the final speech in a series intended to outline his Iraq strategy. “Given Saddam’s history and the lessons of September the 11th, my decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision.”

Bush spoke a day before Iraqis go to the polls to elect a new parliament, a step that the administration is counting on to help stabilize the country enough that the U.S. can begin bringing some its 160,000 troops home.

Tying together his arguments from three previous speeches over the past two weeks on why the U.S. must stay engaged in Iraq, Bush said that even though the original rationale for the war turned out to be false — that Hussein was compiling biological and chemical weapons — the invasion was critical to the safety of the U.S.
bloomberg.com

…President Bush’s comments took many by surprise because the administration has said little over the past 1,000 days on how many Iraqis have died because of the war and occupation. Since Bush spoke on Monday, several officials denied the government was keeping a tally on Iraqi deaths. White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said that Bush was “citing public estimates,” not a government-produced figure. Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Venable said there is no official tally of civilian deaths in Iraq. However, Venable said the U.S. military does collect data on deaths from insurgent attacks. If the government did keep close tabs on Iraqi civilian deaths, they might likely find the number is far higher than 30,000.

Last year the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet published a study estimating that over 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died because of the war. The study determined that the risk of death by violence for civilians in Iraq is now 58 times higher than before the US-led invasion. We are joined in Washington by the lead researcher of that report.
democracynow.org

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is in the early stages of drafting a wartime request for up to $100 billion more for Iraq and Afghanistan, lawmakers say, a figure that would push spending related to the wars toward a staggering half-trillion dollars.

Reps. Bill Young, R-Fla., chairman of the House appropriations defense panel, and John Murtha, D-Pa., senior Democrat on that subcommittee, say the military has informally told them it wants $80 billion to $100 billion in a war-spending request that the White House is expected to send Congress next year.

That would be in addition to $50 billion Congress is about to give the Pentagon for operations in Iraq for the beginning of 2006. Military commanders expect that money to last through May.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress has approved more than $300 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan, including military operations, reconstruction, embassy security and foreign aid, as well as other costs related to the war on terrorism, according to the Congressional Research Service, which writes reports for Congress.
indystar.com

THIS IS A story about an airplane, a Boeing 737 passenger jet.

This is also a story about torture, the war on terrorism, and the Central Intelligence Agency’s practice of quietly snatching suspected terrorists and transporting them to dungeons in far-off lands, where, allegedly, they’re detained indefinitely – without charges in any court of law in any country – drugged, beaten, threatened, and interrogated. –These two narrative threads, as you’ve probably guessed by now, are interwoven. A growing body of evidence suggests the plane you’re about to read about is used by CIA agents to shuttle prisoners to clandestine jails around the world. And new clues, revealed here for the first time, link this airliner to a small office in Reno, Nev. – and to one of the biggest figures in Nevada politics.
sfbg.com