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Co-editors: Seán Mac Mathúna • John Heathcote
Consulting editor: Themistocles Hoetis
Field Correspondent: Allen Hougland

E-mail: editors@fantompowa.net

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.

Executive Order 13303

The Moorkiller

Revealed: the secret cabal which spun for Blair

The Institute for Advanced and Strategic Studies paper on securing Israel by destabilising Iraq, author Richard Perle & others published 1996

Operation Southern Focus - the illegal start to the War on Iraq

No Fly List for US dissidents

Human shields threatened with12 years imprisonment by US Government

Bush-Linked Company Handled Security for the WTC, Dulles and United by Margie Burns

war news archive

Link to Venik's Aviation: latest Russian Military Intelligence reports

(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."

Other links on this subject from RECLAIM DEMOCRACY and TOM PAINE and Campaign for Labor Rights

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 ;

McCarthyism Watch, Electronic Privacy Information Centre, ACLU , civilliberties.com

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.

Ethics Daily , The Guardian , WWS

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.

 

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