Iraq
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On the Road to Fallujah By William Bowles
6 November 2004 Ship me somewhere east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, Where there ar’n’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst. Mandalay. Rudyard Kipling In days of ‘yore’ when the Brits had an empire they used to justify their colonial ‘adventures’ with talk of a ‘civilising mission’… Continue reading
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100,000 Iraqi Civilian Deaths – Part 2
4 November 2004 — Media Lens By way of a splendid coincidence, Media Lens received this delayed response from the BBC on November 3: Continue reading
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Al-Qaqa’a: ‘Benign’ Neglect by a Malign Power By William Bowles
The latest ‘revelations’ to emerge from the annals of the US occupation of Iraq concerns the ‘loss’ of over 350 tons of high explosives that the US was meant to be guarding at the military base of al-Qaqa’a. According to the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), the stockpile went ‘missing’ some time after January 2004.… Continue reading
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Psych-Wars By William Bowles
26 October 2004 “The target suffered a terminal illness before a firing squad in Baghdad.” — CIA officer testifying to US Senate hearing, after bloody CIA aided Ba’ath Party coup overthrew Iraqi Prime Minister Abdel Kassem, 1963 The Kurt Nimmo article I posted here last week prompted some emails on the issue of US agent… Continue reading
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Embedded in a Media Fantasy World: The case against objective reporting By William Bowles
26 September 2004 I recently had a brief exchange with the Washington correspondent for the Independent, Andrew Buncombe over his ‘paper’s coverage of events in Iraq. Now although I’ve never actually met Andy, and I’m sure he’s a decent fellow, I brought to his attention a recent ‘War Report’ compiled by an Iraqi journalist that… Continue reading
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Iraq: Illusion and Reality – Media coverage reveals the Imperial Mindset By William Bowles
The Western media made a great play of the ‘sovereignty’ that Iraq allegedly achieved a little over a month ago when CIA/MI5 ‘asset’ Allawi was installed ‘Diem-style’ by his US paymasters. And indeed, ever since then, the media in direct collusion with the state has tried to foist on an extremely sceptical public the illusion… Continue reading
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Remnants of Empire By William Bowles
The media’s response to the Butler ‘report’ has been tediously predictable, with most of the press pundits seeming to emit a collective sigh of relief as if, more even than the government, they can’t wait to see the back of Iraq and get on with what they know best – hobnobbing with their pals in… Continue reading
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Separate but Synonymous: The Media and the State By William Bowles
There could be no clearer admission of the incestuous relationship between the media and the state than the subtext within this apparently ‘objective’ reportage on the impending release of the Butler report on the government‘s justification for the invasion of Iraq. Continue reading
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A Failure of Policy Not of Intelligence By William Bowles
Anybody who has read Agee’s book on his time in the CIA will laugh at today’s ‘report’ on the CIA’s failures to correctly assess the ‘dangers’ from Saddam Hussein’s fabled WMD. In the CIA Diary Agee reveals that the primary objective of the CIA is not the gathering of intelligence (most of which appears to… Continue reading
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The world – one year later By William Bowles
Like a runaway train, the ‘war on terror’ that must have seemed such a good idea at the time, has taken on a life all its own that now threatens to crash into the imperial terminus. Continue reading
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Rumbling in the Ruling Ranks By William Bowles
Much play has been made over the statement by 52 former UK diplomats accusing the government of an “illegal” occupation of Iraq and of doing a volte face over Israeli occupation of Palestine. But before the anti-war posse get all worked up over it, it’s wise to check their statement a little more carefully before… Continue reading
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Pundit’s Paradise By William Bowles
Once more, in Iraq, the entirely false notion is promulgated of a civil war, a civil war moreover, that is only being averted by the presence of an occupying army! Where does this nonsense come from and on what is it based? Continue reading
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The Power of the Press – to reorder reality By William Bowles
Well you wouldn’t know it from all the tributes to the tenth anniversary in the media, that within two days of the Rwandan tragedy, the US knew not only what was going on but who did it and where and when they did it. The report from the invaluable National Security Archive released via a… Continue reading
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Soldiers of misfortune: One story, two takes By William Bowles
So went the headline in the Independent on 1 April 2004 and the story (penned by ‘anti-war’ journalist Robert Fisk) occupied the entire front page and ran onto page 2. The four Americans, described by Fisk in the article as “contractors” were actually mercenaries or Private Military Contractors who worked for Blackwater Security Consulting and… Continue reading
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Emergency of State By William Bowles
There’s something truly scary about Tony Blair and the crew he has assembled around him. This guy is on a ‘mission’ and it is yet another example of serendipity at work insofar as the needs of the moment always throw up someone with the right mentality for the dirty job of building an empire. Enter… Continue reading
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Blair: Out-Gunned and then brought up Short By William Bowles
On Thursday 26 February, ‘lose cannon’ Ms Clare Short, former member of the Labour Cabinet went one step further and accused the Blair government of bugging Kofi Annan’s telephone conversations as well. Blair, understandably pissed off about Ms Short’s revelations attempted to make out that not only were Ms Short’s allegations untrue but in a… Continue reading
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Wriggling, Squirming and Sliding into Sleaze By William Bowles
As predicted, Blair has done his best to reset the agenda re the ‘dictionary’ definition of WMD but then what other choice does he have? Blair’s capos Reid, Straw, Hain, Hoon et al have been working overtime trying to do damage control but it’s the performance of Margaret Beckett’s that took the cake this week,… Continue reading
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Damn! What a Week (and it’s only Wednesday) By William Bowles
Hard to know where to begin what with Blair desperately seeking solutions. Kay, Jones, Powell and co, all spilling the beans (not, I add of the ricin kind) and jumping ship in what now looks remarkably like a total rout for the imperium. Blair protests in Parliament that Saddam’s ‘plans’ are pretty much the same… Continue reading
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Mea (Ex)culpa By William Bowles
Aish! Well I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised but in an op-ed piece in today’s Independent(03/02/04) by Mary Dejevsky headed “Let’s be honest: journalists failed as well”, we are told that: “We journalists failed to ask pertinent questions that could have at least cast doubt on the information the government supplied…. How could so congenitally… Continue reading
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Shit Happens! By William Bowles
Not since the Suez Crisis of 1956 has the capitalist state in Britain been in such disarray, with every attempt to justify its actions backfiring in the most spectacular fashion. And when one looks back to the beginning of the propaganda campaign in 2002, a common thread has been one cock-up after another, with Blair… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 