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Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Recent
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August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
on the Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad
August 20, 2003
Robert Fisk
Now No
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Caoimhe Butterly
Life and Death on the Frontlines of Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
UN Bombing: Act of Terrorism or Guerrilla War?
Michael Egan
Revisiting the Paranoid Style in the Dark
Ramzi Kysia
Peace
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Steven Higgs
NPR and the NAFTA Highway
John L. Hess
A Downside Day
Edward Said
The Imperial Bluster of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Gridlock at Path 15: the California Blackouts were the "Wake
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Website of the Day
Ashcroft's Patriotic Hype
August 19, 2003
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Blackouts Happen
Gary Leupp
"Our Patch": Australia v. the Evil Doers of the South
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Sean Donahue
Uribe's Cruel Model: Colombia Moves Toward Totalitarianism
Matt Martin
Bush's Credibility Problem on Missile Defense
Juliana Fredman
Recipe for the Destruction of a Hudna
John Ross
Fox Government's Attack on Mexican Basques
Sasan Fayazmanesh
What Kermit Roosevelt Didn't Say
Website of the Day
Tom Delay's Dual Loyalities
August 18, 2003
Uri Avnery
Hero in War and Peace
Stan Goff
The Volunteer Military and the Wicked Adventure
Cathy Breen
Baghdad on the Hudson
Michael Kimaid
Fight the Power (Companies)!
Jason Leopold
The California Rip-Off Revisited: Arnold, Milken and Ken Lay
Matt Siegfried
The Bush Administration in Context
Elaine Cassel
At Last, A Judge Who Acts Like a Judge
Alexander Cockburn
Judy Miller's War
Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy of Blackout Pete Wilson
Website of the Day
Fire Griles!
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
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Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
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David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
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Peter Phillips
Inside
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Brian Cloughley
Charlie Wilson and Pakistan: the Strange Congressman Behind the
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Linville and Ruder
Tyson
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Jim Lobe
Bush Administration Divided Over Iran
Ramzy Baroud
Sharon Freezes the Road Map
Tom Turnipseed
Blowback in Iraq
Gary Leupp
Condi's
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The Heavy Cost of Empire
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
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Murderous Errors: Executing the Innocent
Ralph Nader
Make the Recall Count
Alexander Cockburn
Ted Honderich Hit with "Anti-Semitism" Slur
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Dean's Constitutional Hang-Up
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Impeach
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August
23, 2003
The Cemetery at Basra
Broken
Remnants of Britain's Imperial Past
By ROBERT FISK
in Basra.
The soldiers of Britain's forgotten armies of
Iraq lie beneath the dirt and garbage of Basra's official war
cemetery, almost 3,000 of them, their gravestones scattered and
smashed, the memorial book long looted from the entrance, even
the names of the dead stripped from the screen wall.
Only by prowling through the dust and
litter can you find a clue to some of the great ironies of recent
Mesopotamian history. Here lies Sapper GW Curry of the Royal
Engineers, for example, who was 31 when he died on 5 May 1943.
His gravestone is broken, lying on its side. Not far away is
the stone erected in memory of Aircraftman 1st Class KG Levett
of the RAF, who died on 31 October 1942. Still visible at the
bottom is the inscription: "We shall meet again in a happier
place. Mum."
A few metres further is the memorial
to Leading Seaman FC Smith who died aboard HMS President III
in March 1943, a break in the stone running through the last
lines of Binyon's "Poem for the Fallen": "At the
going down of the sun and in the morning/We will remember them."
The ruined Indian army cemetery opposite
contains an unknown number of bodies whose numbers and names
were--to the shame of the British Empire for which they died--never
recorded. But if the great British and Indian cemeteries at Basra
are a disgrace, their fate was probably inevitable. They came
under sustained shellfire during the eight-year war that followed Saddam Hussein's
insane 1980 invasion of Iran, and looters stripped the place
of brass and stones in the aftermath of the Shia Muslim revolt
against Saddam in 1991. The Iraqi son of the old caretaker told
me that his father was, for many years, too frightened to enter
the graveyard.
Yet here lie the bones--both literal
and historical--of imperial adventures that have much in common
with our most recent invasion of Iraq. The British cemetery contains
2,551 burials, 74 of them unidentified, of soldiers who stormed
ashore in Basra in 1914 at the start of a British-Indian campaign
that eventually captured all of Iraq from the Ottoman Turks.
Somewhere amid the bracken, for example,
lie the remains of Major George Wheeler VC of the 7th Hariana
Lancers, killed as "this gallant Officer"-- so his
official citation says -- single-handedly charged the Turkish
standards at Shaiba on 13 April 1915. After Rashid Ali had declared
an alliance with Nazi Germany in Baghdad in April 1941, the British
stormed Basra again--just as they did in March--and lost hundreds
more men as they drove Iraqi troops from the port city in 1941.
According to the Commonwealth War Graves
Commission, whose director-general visited Iraq two months ago,
there are ambitions plans to restore the Basra cemetery, to re-erect
new headstones and place the names of the 1914-18 war dead back
on the wall.
In fact, the commission was preparing
the rehabilitation of the North Gate British cemetery in Baghdad--with
the permission of Saddam's government, of course--when the latest
invasion began. The Basra restoration will take up to five years
and cost, according to the commission's spokesman Peter Francis,
"millions". Always supposing, of course, that "stability"--that
quality so hard to find in Iraq--is restored.
Robert Fisk is
a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity
the Nation. He is also a contributor to Cockburn and
St. Clair's forthcoming book, The
Politics of Anti-Semitism.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
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