NEW YORK — Small groups of Americans opposed to the Iraq war and the death penalty decried Saddam Hussein’s execution, and the centre headed by one of the former dictator’s lawyers said the hanging was part of a plan by President George Bush to escalate the war.

The small rallies on Saturday in New York’s Times Square and in Boston, led by a group affiliated with former US attorney general Ramsey Clark, were among several condemnations of Saddam’s hanging.

Activists in Detroit also planned their own demonstration. Clark, who leads the New York-based International Action Center and was one of Saddam’s defence lawyers, predicted during the Iraqi leader’s trial that a bloodbath would follow if he was executed.
In a statement, the center said his hanging was part of a plan by Bush to escalate the war. (more…)

The Iraqi government has launched an inquiry into unofficial mobile phone footage showing the execution of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
The mobile phone footage showed he exchanged taunts and insults with witnesses at his hanging on Saturday.

The grainy video showed the former leader being told to “go to hell” by someone attending the hanging.

One of the trial prosecutors who saw the execution said he threatened to halt it if the jeering did not stop.

Munkith al-Faroon - who can be heard appealing for order on the unofficial video - said that he had threatened to walk out.

This could have halted the execution, as a prosecution observer must, by law, be present. (more…)

With his plain pine coffin strapped into an American military helicopter for a predawn journey across the desert, Saddam Hussein, the executed dictator who built a legend with his defiance of America, completed a turbulent passage into history on Sunday.

Like the helicopter trip, just about everything in the 24 hours that began with Mr. Hussein’s being taken to his execution from his cell in an American military detention center in the postmidnight chill of Saturday had a surreal and even cinematic quality.

Part of it was that the Americans, who turned him into a pariah and drove him from power, proved to be his unlikely benefactors in the face of Iraq’s new Shiite rulers who seemed bent on turning the execution and its aftermath into a new nightmare for the Sunni minority privileged under Mr. Hussein.

The 110-mile journey aboard a Black Hawk helicopter carried Mr. Hussein’s body to an American military base north of Tikrit, Camp Speicher, named for an American Navy pilot lost over Iraq in the first hours of the Persian Gulf war in 1991. From there, an Iraqi convoy carried him to Awja, the humble town beside the Tigris River that Mr. Hussein, in the chandeliered palaces that became his habitat as ruler, spoke of as emblematic of the miseries of his lonely and impoverished youth. (more…)

John Scarlett, who took responsibility for the error-ridden dossier that justified the war in Iraq, is knighted in today’s New Year’s Honours list. The award will enrage peace campaigners, who have accused the veteran spymaster of saving Tony Blair’s skin over the flawed case for the invasion.

The news came as a British soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in Basra yesterday, the 127th to die since the invasion in 2003.

Sir John, the head of MI6, played a key role in the Hutton Inquiry hearings into the death of the weapons expert David Kelly, three years ago. He steadfastly defended the dossier, which contained the notorious claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes. And he dismissed accusations he had bowed to pressure to “sex up” the document’s conclusions.

As chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, he told the inquiry he had “overall charge and responsibility” for the dossier.

Sir John allowed last-minute changes that had the effect of strengthening its conclusions, leading Lord Hutton to suggest that he could have been “subconsciously influenced” by his political masters. (more…)

Seven police officers have been charged with murder and attempted murder for a shooting on a New Orleans bridge six days after Hurricane Katrina that killed two people and wounded four others.

The incident on the Danziger Bridge in the eastern part of the city on September 4, 2005, has come to represent the lawlessness that descended on the city in the aftermath of the storm.

At the time New Orleans sweltered under a blistering heat, corpses littered the streets and looters ransacked shops and businesses.

New Orleans police have described the incident as a shootout with snipers, but victims and their relatives claim it was a police ambush.

“We cannot allow our police officers to shoot and kill our citizens without justification like rabid dogs,” Eddie Jordan, New Orleans District Attorney, said in a statement. (more…)

Detectives investigating the murder of Alexander Litvin-enko are trying to trace a Russian businessman who flew to Britain at the same time as a consignment of deadly polonium-210 was allegedly smuggled into London.

The man was spotted on a flight from Hamburg sitting beside Dimtri Kovtun, another Russian whom German police are investigating for trafficking the radioactive material used to poison the former KGB spy.

Officers have studied CCTV footage from airports at Hamburg and London and are understood to believe that the two men were travelling together. However, the mystery figure disappeared after leaving Heathrow with Mr Kovtun. The name he used on the flight and the passport presented to immigration officials does not show up on any hotel register in the capital. It is believed that he met up again with Mr Kovtun in London on November 1, the day Litvinenko fell ill.

Mr Kovtun was one of the last people to see Litvinenko before he collapsed. Scotland Yard will not say if it regards Mr Kovtun as a victim, a witness or a suspect. (more…)

It’s fishy as hell.

Paul Sanford, a prominent Aptos, California, attorney, who accused Karl Rove of treason in the Plame outing case, took a leap from the Embassy Suites Hotel in Monterey Bay on Christmas Eve. Police describe it as “probable” suicide, even though it appears Sanford was not depressed.

“Friends and associates expressed disbelief at the news of Sanford’s death and that it was ruled a suicide, saying Sanford seemed happy and had made many plans for this week and in coming months. [Business associate and friend Shawn Mills] said he and Sanford recently decided to open a shared law office to serve Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, something Sanford was looking forward to doing,” reports the Monterey Herald. “Mills said he had spoken to Sanford’s wife, Paula, and that she also was in shock. He said Sanford, a father of two, was a devoted family man.” Sanford “would never have intentionally put his family through that trauma. Something’s not right, it doesn’t make sense.”

On July 25, 2005, in the James S. Brady Briefing Room at the White House, Sanford asked then press secretary Scott McClellan about Karl Rove, accused at the time by Joseph Wilson, the husband of Valerie Plame, of outing his wife as a CIA employee in retaliation for Wilson’s op-ed published in the New York Times. Wilson criticized the citation of bogus yellowcake documents used as flimsy justification for invading Iraq and murdering more than 650,000 Iraqis. (more…)

A military analysts’ chart did not identify hijackers beforehand, senators report.

WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee has rejected as untrue one of the most disturbing claims about the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes — a congressman’s contention that a team of military analysts identified Mohamed Atta or other hijackers before the attacks — according to a summary of the panel’s investigation obtained by The Times.

The conclusion contradicts assertions by Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) and a few military officers that U.S. national security officials ignored startling intelligence available in early 2001 that might have helped to prevent the attacks.

In particular, Weldon and other officials have repeatedly claimed that the military analysts’ effort, known as Able Danger, produced a chart that included a picture of Atta and identified him as being tied to an Al Qaeda cell in Brooklyn, N.Y. Weldon has also said that the chart was shared with White House officials, including Stephen J. Hadley, then deputy national security advisor.

But after a 16-month investigation, the Intelligence Committee has concluded that those assertions are unfounded. (more…)

Keeping Africans in chains while herding Westerners into the same prison cell

Bono’s latest efforts to dodge taxes and invest in the very capitalist franchises he supposedly rallies against prove that he is one of the leading characters in a puppet show that, far from helping emaciated kids in Ethiopia, serves only to keep the third world in chains while herding Westerners into the same debtor slavery prison.

It’s commonly acknowledged that of the estimated $500 billion that has been poured into Africa over the last 40 years, the majority has gone no further than ruling dictators who keep the money and use it to bankroll their opulent lifestyles while their disease ridden subjects starve to death and are infected with AIDS from poisoned vaccines generously donated to them by billionaire philanthropists who advocate mass population reduction and genocide.

The only way to truly elevate third world is to give them the tools to build the infrastructure necessary for modernization.

But the World Bank/IMF/Globalist doctrine is not about improving the status of third world countries, its about bleeding westerners dry in the name of fighting poverty and AIDS and then siphoning off the profits to their own dirty cronies. Bono is a figurehead for this policy and was even in contention for the World Bank crown before losing out to arch Neo-Fascist Wolfowitz. (more…)

Margaret Beckett reopened the controversy over the Government’s dossier about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction when she admitted yesterday that ministers had realised before the invasion the claim that they could be deployed in 45 minutes was probably wrong.

The Foreign Secretary said the 45-minute claim was of “little relevance” and used only once.

“Perhaps people began to quickly think ‘I’m not sure about that’,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

The claim – that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) could be used within 45 minutes of Saddam Hussein giving the order to deploy them – was contained in the Government’s dossier in September 2002 making the case for the conflict. (more…)

In a disciplinary complaint, the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) alleges that Morgan Stanley used a “9/11 smokescreen” to hide e-mails sought by angry claimants in numerous arbitration proceedings from October 2001 through March 2005.

The securities industry’s self-regulating arm accuses Morgan Stanley of “falsely claiming that millions of emails it possessed had been lost in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, where its email servers were housed.”

“In fact, according to the complaint, Morgan Stanley possessed millions of pre-September 11 emails that had been restored to its system shortly after September 11 using back-up tapes,” stated an NASD press release obtained by RAW STORY. “Many other emails were maintained on individual users’ computers and were therefore never affected by the attacks, yet Morgan Stanley often failed to search those computers when responding to requests.” (more…)

Film avoids assassination conspiracy questions but Yoko Ono’s cryptic quote lets suspicions linger

The U.S. vs John Lennon is an ultimately uplifting story of how one man put his hard earned fame, fortune and adulation on the line, neutralized the nagging voice of ego and gave up everything including eventually his life to affect change and take on the behemoth of the criminal Nixon administration.

The newly released documentary film charts Lennon’s progression from outspoken Beatle to iconic rallying figurehead for the Vietnam peace movement of the late sixties and early seventies. The U.S. government’s attempt to deport Lennon and derail the political juggernaut that at one point threatened to organize a road show of protests leading up to the 1972 Republican Convention is presented with an implicit knowing wink to contemporary events. (more…)

Video Shows McVeigh was in military receiving instruction in “explosives and demolition” over a year after official story says he was discharged, whistleblower harassed for years while unknowingly in possession of bombshell tape

NEW COMPARISON PHOTOS

(click to enlarge)

A video that shows Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh at a U.S. military base that specializes in explosives and demolition training over a year after he supposedly left the army puts the official story of the April 19 1995 federal building bombing under serious doubt and mandates a re-opening of an investigation into the terror attack that killed 168 people. (more…)

Some kept visiting schools for 3 years after FBI caught them on tape

A Midtown strip mall that should have housed the best of the best served as Corruption Central in Tucson.

Two military recruiting stations sit side-by-side there, one run by the Army, the other by the Marines. Between them, a total of seven recruiters were on the take, secretly accepting bribes to transport cocaine, even as most spent their days visiting local high schools.

They had help from several more recruiters at an Army National Guard office, where one recruiter was said to be selling cocaine from the trunk of his recruiting vehicle.

Together, these dozen or so recruiters formed the nucleus of one of the FBI’s biggest public corruption cases, the sting known as Operation Lively Green, which unfolded in Southern Arizona from 2002-2004 and was made public last year. (more…)

Dose ten times the lethal level, Investigators are baffled by amount

British investigators believe that Alexander Litvinenko’s killers used more than $10 million of polonium-210 to poison him. Preliminary findings from the post mortem examination on the former KGB spy suggest that he was given more than ten times the lethal dose.
Police do not know why the assassins used so much of the polonium-210, and are investigating whether the poison was part of a consignment to be sold on the black market.

They believe that whoever orchestrated the plot knew of its effects, but are unsure whether the massive amount was used to send a message — it made it easier for British scientists to detect — or is evidence of a clumsy operation. (more…)