Slaughter House Iraq

By Patrick Cockburn
November 28th, 2006

Iraq is rending itself apart. The signs of collapse are everywhere. In Baghdad, the police often pick up more than 100 tortured and mutilated bodies in a single day. Government ministries make war on each other.

A new and ominous stage in the disintegration of the Iraqi state came earlier this month when police commandos from the Shia-controlled Interior Ministry kidnapped 150 people from the Sunni-run Higher Education Ministry in the heart of Baghdad.

Iraq may be getting close to what Americans call “the Saigon moment”, the time when it becomes evident to all that the government is expiring. “They say that the killings and kidnappings are being carried out by men in police uniforms and with police vehicles,” the Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said to me with a despairing laugh this summer. “But everybody in Baghdad knows that the killers and kidnappers are real policemen.”

It is getting worse. The Iraqi army and police are not loyal to the state. If the US army decides to confront the Shia militias it could well find Shia military units from the Iraqi army cutting the main American supply route between Kuwait and Baghdad. One convoy was recently stopped at a supposedly fake police checkpoint near the Kuwait border and four American security men and an Austrian taken away.

The US and British position in Iraq is far more of a house built on sand than is realised in Washington or London, despite the disasters of the past three-and-a-half years. George Bush and Tony Blair show a unique inability to learn from their mistakes, largely because they do not want to admit having committed any errors in the first place.

Civil war is raging across central Iraq, home to a third of the country’s 27 million people. As Shia and Sunni flee each other’s neighbourhoods, Iraq is turning into a country of refugees. (….Full Article Here)

The Litvinenko Plot Thickens

By Karl W B Schwarz
November 27th, 2006

Many are pointing out that they are not buying the Alexander Litvinenko drama on TV. If someone wanted to get rid of him, they could disappear him and just be done with it. This has every appearance of being a PR and propaganda program embedded in a soap opera.

When I see an issue brewing on the television and it is an international incident, the first question I ask myself is who benefits? Cui bono?

What sort of dynamics are going on between competing factions and one side is losing badly? Right now I can assertively state that the US, UK and Israel agenda is sliding backwards and it is they who are most highly motivated to try to slow down Russia and Vladimir Putin in any manner they can. They cannot with their current game plan and this will not change the dynamics. They are going to have to learn to work with those dynamics and they absolutely refuse to do so.

The last email update exposed the DEBKAfile and it pointed out that Yukos Oil Jewish fugitive from Russian authorities Leonid Nevzlin had an opinion about what happened to former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko. The first thing that popped out at me from that news flash was a wanted Russian Jewish fugitive was the chairman of the Diaspora Museum in Israel. DEBKAfile has long been rumored to have Zionist ties as a misinformation source.

Murdered Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko passed documents to former Yukos CEO in Israel months before his death - report
November 25, 2006, 9:10 AM (GMT+02:00)

Leonid Nevzlin, former CEO of the oil giant and current chairman of the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, says the former Russian spy came to Israel with classified documents on Yukos which may be damaging to Russian leaders…
http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=3540 

Guess what folks, those documents probably named Leonid Nevzlin and many others.

This is the same Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv that holds a Marc Rich seminar each year. Did you put that dot on your radar screen? That is the same Marc Rich that Bill Clinton pardoned for crimes in the United States and outstanding warrants against him.

(more…)