“Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own? Decided that the best way to embarrass Arabs and make them talk was to have them walk around nude?”

That good question was posed by Gary Myers, a civilian defense attorney for Sergeant Ivan Frederick, who is one of the military police accused of systematic abuse of detainees in the interrogation unit in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad (see Torture at Abu ...

Gwydion M. Williams looks at the mass of contradictions in the accusations against Muqtada al-Sadr for the killing of Abdel Majid al-Khoei

The USA’s mission in Iraq is freedom, which means people freely doing the stuff that the USA wants them to do. The trouble is, most Iraqis have something else in mind, and so cannot be free in the sense of freely choosing until it is certain that they will be freely doing the stuff that the USA wants ...

How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
Issue of 2004-05-24
Posted 2004-05-15
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American ...

The impending American / British war on Iraq is not a war for oil. If there was an actual or potential threat to the oil the West needs, and war on Iraq was a means of dealing with that threat, there would not be mass demonstrations against the war all round Europe.
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War for oil would be popular. The reason there have been so many slogans condemning this as a war for oil is that it is not a war for oil. A war for oil would be ...

Resolution 1511 was passed unanimously by the Security Council on 16 October. It

(a) paves the way for the occupying powers in Iraq to privatise state assets, and

(b) transforms the occupying forces in Iraq into UN forces in all but name, and authorises them to use force to put down resistance to the occupation.

The chief opponents of the invasion - France, Germany and Russia - voted for these measures, and so did Syria and ...

Kenneth Clarke made the best anti-war speech in the Commons before the invasion of Iraq (on 26 February), and on 22 October he made the best anti-war speech since the invasion (Hansard, col 692ff) in a debate initiated by the Conservative Party calling for a judicial inquiry. Clarke’s speech was hardly reported in the press at all. The following is an edited version:

I think that the decision to go to war in Iraq was the worst military ...

This article attempts to answer the question: has Iraq got any effective nuclear, chemical or biological (NCB) weapons, with the emphasis on the word &quot;effective&quot;?

It is well known that Iraq has never had weapons of mass destruction, that is, nuclear weapons, and its development programme was terminated by UNSCOM years ago.

But what of chemical and biological weapons? The US/UK say they know that Iraq has large quantities of ...

Tony Blair told the House of Commons on 15 January:
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"We have chosen to go down the UN route; I think it is important that we do.
... If the inspectors come back and we find that there is a breach of the UN
resolution, action will follow. We have said that a second UN resolution is
preferable, because it is far better that the UN come together. We have also
said that there are circumstances in which a UN resolution is not ...

Standing beside Tony Blair at Le Touquet, President Chirac said that war was
the worst possible solution and called for the inspections to continue in
Iraq, adding:
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"I note that the inspection system has proved very effective in the past. I
note that in the first round, more arms were destroyed than in the Gulf War.
Therefore the inspection system is very effective." (Guardian, 5 February)
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That was assuredly not music to ...

When, on 11 September 2001, I heard Tony Blair state on our behalf that Britain would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the US, my first thought was that Canary Wharf would be next. And in the past two years, as it became more difficult for al-Qaeda to attack the US mainland, I expected a strike on the more accessible British mainland, particularly after the US/UK invasion and occupation of Iraq.

But it wasn’t until last month that there was a ...