Co-editors:
Seán Mac Mathúna • John Heathcote
Consulting editor:
Themistocles Hoetis
Field Correspondent:
Allen Hougland
War News Update with recommended
sites & background information
AUGUST
UPDATES
AP Photo/Osman Orsal
After breaching the NATO Constitution by
making the organisation responsible for controlling the chaos they have
left in Afghanistan, the US is hurriedly pressurising its client states
to send soldiers to Iraq. In the picture above, Turkish riot police in Istanbul
struggle with demonstrators protesting against sending Turkish forces to
Iraq on Aug, 12th 2003, as Turkey's generals and politicians met to discuss
the matter. An estimated 1,200 soldiers from Honduras, Dominican Republic,
El Salvador and Nicaragua are already on their way to Iraq, to replace US
troops on the street who are becoming 'soft targets' for the continuing
resistance.
-
the continuing War
in Iraq and Iraqi resistance
-
continuing inquiries
into conflict and intelligence matters
-
continuing
questions about 911 and US Civil liberties
(reliable source for Flame since the war
on Yugoslavia)
Executive Order 13303
A Presidential directive, known
as Executive Order 13303 (which can be downloaded as a PDF from this
page or here)
was slipped out by the Bush Regime on May 22nd.
It has been little remarked on in the British press, but its effect will
be a further undermining of international law by the US administration and
their corporate masters. The Executive Order effectively grants immunity
to all US corporations involved in the oil business in Iraq, for any civil
or criminal cases which may be bought against them. This means, as pointed
out in a small Guardian
article of August 15th 2003, that
Corporate oil security workers
who shoot Iraqis in the course of their working day would be immune from
prosecution. If a tanker sinks or a refinery explodes, the company will
be immune from judgment, as indeed would a firm that decided to employ slave
labour to build a pipeline, or catastrophically polluted the environment.
"13303 cancels the concept of corporate accountability and abandons the
rule of [domestic and international] law," explains a paper by Tom Devine,
director of US Democratic legal thinktank Government Accountability Project.
"[It] is a blank cheque for corporate anarchy."
No Fly List
The existence of a second list,
apart from the 'no-fly' list of about 1,000 potential 'terrorists' and criminals
deemed too dangerous to be allowed on US airlines, was revealed by the new
US security agency, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at
the end of July, 2003. The TSA only acknowledged the existence of such a
list, giving no further details concerning how many people are named, and
for what reason. However it is suspected that the list could contain the
names of thousands of US citizens, guilty of nothing more than dissent.
The list was only revealed under the Freedom of Information Act after two
San Francisco anti-war activists, Rebecca Gordon and Jan Adams who worked
for pacifist publication War
Times (and probably not the web-based War
Times), were detained at the airport and told they were on an FBI register.
Other cases reported in The Independent on Sunday, 3rd August 2003 were
a 71-year old nun prevented from flying from Milwaukee to Wahington for
an anti-war protest; and a left-wing lawyer continually detained and strip-searched
on internal US flights.
The American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU) claims a list kept at Oakland Airport was 88 pages long, and
that 24 people had been detained and questioned there, as well as a further
300 citizens at San Francisco airport, with no criminal cases ensuing .
Other links on this topic at
;
Human shields become US Government
targets
Up to 200 US citizens who volunteered
to be human shields in Iraq in the run-up to the recent war, as well as
many other peace activists and humanitarians who visited the country are
being fined up to $1million and threatened with up to 12 years in prison
by the US Treasury. The citizens under threat range from Ms Fippinger, 62,
a retired teacher for the blind who has already received a Treasury demand
to actor Sean Penn. In mid-July a group called Voices
in the Wilderness which had sent 80 delegations to Iraq received
demands dating back to the mid-1990's.
Operation Southern Focus
The War on Iraq was actually
started last Summer, making a mockery of the whole democratic concensus
supposedly achieved in Britain and the
US. In an uncanny echo of the secret - and illegal - bombing of Laos, Thailand
and Cambodia by the Nixon / Kissinger Administration in the 1970's, 606
precision guided bombs were targetted on 391 locations believed to contain
Iraqi air defences.
A report in The Guardian of
July 21, 2003, the chief allied war commander, Lieutenant General Michael
Moseley admitted the Operation Southern Focus was launched in Summer 2002,
well before Bush went to the UN to press the case for war. It would allow
the swift advance of ground troops, and ensure that no serious fixed weapon
sites threatened the US troops or air-cover.
The USAF General originally
made the admissions at a meeting of senior US officers in Nevada to the
New York Times and Washington Post, stating that the air strikes were carried
out '. . . under the guise of enforcing the southern no-fly zone over the
country'.
It is obvious that the Bush
Administration were aware of the depleted Iraqi military capabilities, even
as they were talking up the threat of Saddam Hussein across the world.
The Moorkiller
The 2,000- strong contingent
of Spanish troops who are paying the price for PM Aznar volunteering to
be the Canary Islands-teaboy at the Bush- Blair Canary Island pre-war Press
stunt, are being given a new badge to wear for the Iraq operation. The badge
will display the Cross of St. James of Compostela, known as the 'Moorkiller'
in Spain for leading the Christian 'reconquista' of Spain in the Middle
Ages. The troops will be sent to the sacred Shia city of Najaf, and Spanish
politicians and newspapers have pointed out that the symbol is both offensive
to the local population, and increases the risks for their troops of being
the latest victims of the Iraqi resistance.
US WMD's
leave legacy of horror
A study published recently
in the Journal
of Occupational and Environmental Medicine found extremely high levels
of the most toxic dioxins were present in 95% of the people, and their locally-produced
food, in areas just outside the Vietnamese capital, Ho Chi Minh City last
year. The 'elevated TCDD levels', the most toxic dioxin of all was present
in blood samples, and farm produce, fish from the lake near the city of
Bien Hoa, 20 miles to the North of the capital; as well as on the grounds
of an abandoned USAF base where the WMD's had been stored. Reuters in Hanoi
reports that Vietnam estimates a million of its citizens were exposed to
Agent Orange, used by the US to defoliate the land to aid their high-altitude
warfare. Even now, there are unbelievably high ratios of birth defects recorded
across Vietnam, as a recent report in Asia
Times pointed out.