Wednesday, Nov 19th
Last update09:25:02 AM GMT
All governments lie in wartime but American and British propaganda in Iraq over the past five years has been more untruthful than in any conflict since the First World War.
Often it is difficult to know where the self-deception ends and the deliberate mendacity begins.
The most notorious lie of all was that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. But critics of the war may have focused too much on WMD and not enough on later distortions.
At least two Iraqi families of victims killed by Blackwater security guards in September tell ABC News they have refused compensation offered by the company.
Officials familiar with the case told ABCNews.com last month that Blackwater had resisted U.S. government demands that the company pay at least $100,000 per death, claiming the U.S. government itself hasn't paid that much in similar situations.
TVNL Comment: Resisted demands? What happened to following orders? It is a war zone, isn't it? Don't they work for the government? How the hell do we let this madness continue?
Former White House adviser Lewis “Scooter” Libby, convicted last year for lying to a grand jury and federal agents probing the leak of a CIA agent’s identity, was disbarred from practicing law in the nation’s capital on Thursday.
The U.S. military has given an interrogator immunity for possible abuses against a prisoner now held at Guantanamo Bay in exchange for his cooperation with prosecutors against the detainee in a war-crimes trial.
A survey of 180 in-house counsel working in five European countries identified the US as the jurisdiction they were keenest to avoid, with 29 per cent naming it the country they were most concerned about facing a major dispute in.
The US attracted almost twice as many votes as Russia and China. Despite fears of political interference and corruption in their legal processes, both were named by just 16 per cent of in-house counsel as their most feared jurisdiction.
At this point it seems pretty certain that we are facing an inflationary depression. What’s awful is that much of this is being done by design. The Federal Reserve would prefer to save the banking cartel instead of doing what’s best for the American people. A stable U.S. Dollar would be what’s best for the American people but of course they aren’t moving in that direction. It is likely that we are seeing the start of a domino collapse in the U.S. financial system and it's going to get ugly.
The Americans learned one lesson from Vietnam: don't count the civilian dead. As a result, no one knows how many Iraqis have been killed in the five years since the invasion. Estimates put the toll at between 100,000 and one million, and now a bitter war of numbers is raging.
Lieutenant General Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan during his time as head of US Central Command, once announced, "We don't do body counts."
The US has long inhabited a world of make-believe – of a war that demands no sacrifice, of a consumer boom that demands no payment, of a power and prosperity that seemed America's birthright, whatever events in the real world. Now those fantasies are yielding to the truism coined by Herb Stein, a top White House economic adviser in the 1970s. If something can't go on for ever, it won't.
Iraq’s “Day of Liberation” – as George W. Bush called it – was supposed to begin with a bombardment consisting of 3,000 U.S. missiles delivered over 48 hours, 10 times the number of bombs dropped during the first two days of the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
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