Bridge The bodies of four British soldiers killed by a bomb on a patrol boat in Iraq on Remembrance Sunday have arrived back in the UK. The four, together with the body of a fifth soldier killed in Basra earlier this month, were flown into RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. Staff Sergeant Sharron Elliott, 34, from Ipswich, of the Army's Intelligence Corps, was among the four killed on Sunday when a device attached to a jetty exploded near their boat on the Shatt al-Arab waterway in Basra. She is the second British servicewoman to die in Iraq since the conflict began.   Also killed were Warrant Officer Class 2 Lee Hopkins, 35, of the Royal Signals, and two Royal Marines, Corporal Ben Nowak and Marine Jason Hylton.

The victims of Sunday's attack, which occurred when their boat was travelling near a pontoon bridge on Basra 's Shatt Al-Arab waterway, were named by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) on Tuesday

The incident, in which three other service personnel were also seriously injured, is now the subject of an official investigation.

Meanwhile, the body of Kingsman Jamie Hancock, 19, who was killed after coming under fire while on sentry duty in Basra on November 7th, was also flown home today.

Since coalition forces invaded Iraq in 2003, 125 members of the British armed forces have so far been killed.

Earlier this week, Tony Blair gave evidence to a US panel which is considering what Washington's future strategy should be in Iraq, amid growing concern in America and Britain about the failure of coalition troops to stem rising levels of insurgency and sectarian violence there.
Investigation

t is unclear what the prime minister told the Iraq study group when he addressed them in a closed door session via video link, but Downing Street said beforehand that Mr Blair would ensure the panel was "fully briefed on UK ideas".   Three other service personnel were seriously injured in the attack, which brought the British death toll in Iraq since 2003 to 125.

I

A detailed forensic examination at the scene of the bombing concluded yesterday and the military is continuing its hunt to track down the Shia bombers behind the attack.

3rd Version

It has been reported that the patrol of two rigid raider craft were travelling up the river to the British base at the Shatt al Arab hotel when the boats, carrying 17 troops, went through the bridge which is only opened to river traffic on Sundays. Intelligence sources believe the insurgents waited for the boat to pass before detonating the bomb by command wire or remote control.

British captured

TEHRAN - Iran's hardline Revolutionary Guards are to put on public display three boats seized from British troops last year, state media reported on Thursday. In a move likely to revive British anger over the incident, the report said the captured boats -- which Britain has been trying to get back -- would be shown off to the public near where they were captured.

They will be part of an exhibition marking the Iranian new year.

The British embassy in Tehran gave no immediate reaction to the report.

In June 2004, the Revolutionary Guards detained six British marines and two sailors for three days after claiming the units had strayed into Iranian waters along the waterway that divides southern Iraq from Iran.

The troops, involved in training Iraq river police, were on their way to the southern Iraqi city of Basra.

During their captivity, the troops were paraded blindfold on television and forced publicly to apologise for their "mistake", sparking widespread anger in Britain. One British newspaper report said they had also been subjected to a mock execution.

Iran insists that the boats were intercepted only after they entered Iranian waters but, after the released unit was debriefed, British officials said it appeared they were "forcibly escorted" over the maritime border by the Revolutionary Guards -- one of Iran's most powerful entities.

Investigation into boat blast that killed UK soldiers


Staff and agencies
Monday November 13, 2006
Guardian Unlimited


British troops from the 73rd Engineer squadron patrol the Shatt al-Arab waterway in 2005. Photograph: Odd Anderson/AFP/Getty Images

The Ministry of Defence today named the units that lost soldiers in the bombing of a boat patrol in Iraq as experts analysed the attack in 'minute detail' to find out how it happened.
The blast, on the Shatt al-Arab waterway near Basra, in the south of the country, killed four British soldiers and severely injured three others.

Two Royal Marines from 45 Commando, based in Arbroath, Scotland, and one soldier each from the Royal Signals and Intelligence Corps died when the improvised explosive device went off.

The injured personnel were airlifted to the Shaibah logistics base, south of Basra, for emergency surgery. An MoD spokesman said one had "improved significantly" but the other two remained in a very serious condition.
It was expected that the names of the soldiers who died in the attack, which happened on Remembrance Sunday, would be released tomorrow.

Their families have been informed, but some family members have requested a 24-hour period before the names are released.

MoD officials have given only brief details of the attack, but it is believed an improvised explosive device hit one boat in a two-boat patrol near a bank of the waterway.

Military experts said the device must have contained a large amount of explosives to have resulted in such serious casualties.

Attacks using improvised explosive devices are not uncommon in Iraq - especially in the north of the country - but it is unusual for such a weapon to be used against a boat.

The Shatt al-Arab waterway, a vital supply line running along the Iran-Iraq border, has been patrolled by British forces since 2003 to prevent explosives and weapons being smuggled into Iraq.

The area had been considered one of the safest to patrol by water, and the attack sparked concerns that militants had opened a new "front" against UK troops.

Iran involved

Captain Tane Dunlop, a British army spokesman in Basra, said experts on explosive ordnance and weapons were analysing the incident in minute detail to find out how it happened. Unconfirmed reports in the British media today claimed Shia militants with links to Iran were involved in the attack. In the past, Iran has been blamed for being behind attacks on US-led troops in Iraq, and the UK alleged Tehran had sponsored the training of insurgents in the use of more sophisticated improvised explosive devices.

The defence secretary, Des Browne today condemned what he said was Iranian and Syrian interference in Iraq.

"Throughout the conflict, we have been calling on Iran and Syria to do more to stop the flow into Iraq of foreign fighters, bomb-making equipment and know-how," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"We will continue to talk to all of Iraq's neighbours and to make clear the importance of a solution in Iraq in a regional context."

The latest attack on British troops - the deadliest since five service personnel were killed when their helicopter was shot down in May - has added to the pressure on Tony Blair to set a clear timetable for the withdrawal of forces from Iraq.

The military deaths took the British toll in Iraq to 125 since 2003, and came on a day when the bodies of almost 100 Iraqi civilians were recovered and three US soldiers were killed.

Yesterday, Nick Harvey, the Liberal Democrat defence spokesman, said: "You have to ask whether we are doing more harm than good in Iraq."

Mr Blair, preparing to make his annual Guildhall speech on foreign affairs tonight, is expected to outline a delicate but critical change to his Iraq strategy.

He will signal a willingness to involve Syria, and even Iran, in finding a regional solution, but will also insist - in words directed at the Bush administration - that no peace is likely across the Middle East without a solution to the Palestine-Israel crisis.

Mr Blair will make this case more urgently via video link tomorrow to the Iraq Survey Group, the bipartisan panel chaired by the former US secretary of state James Baker.

The panel is being seen as the route by which Mr Bush will shift his Iraq policy in response to the midterm elections defeat.

There was more violence in Baghdad today when a bomb, thought to have been detonated by a suicide bomber, exploded on a minibus in a mainly Shia area, killing at least 20 people and injuring around 18.
 

Bookmark to del.icio.us


Digg It! new




Last update - 10:11 17/11/2006


Palestinians: Our human shield against Iran nukes?

By Bradley Burston netanyahu

"It's 1938, and Iran is Germany," Benjamin Netanyahu said this week, in a speech to the North American Jewish community. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Netanyahu continued, "is preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state." If Netanyahu is right, and there is little solid evidence to the contrary, the scenario is all too familiar. Iranian defense officials have laid it out again and again - an attack, either American or Israeli, against Iran's nuclear facilities. Either way, Tehran responds with a devastating onslaught against Israel.

How devastating?

"If the Zionist regime commits such stupidity, the response by the Iranian military will be swift, strong and crushing," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammed Ali Hosseini said this week, referring to a possible Israeli strike. "Iran will take no longer than a second to respond."

This, from the one country in all the world whose president has explicitly called for another nation to be "erased."

But Tehran cannot consider a nuclear holocaust against Israel without taking into account those whom Iran holds to be rightful Muslim heirs to Muslim land. The Islamic republic cannot erase the State of Israel without killing large numbers of the very people whose lives it has sworn to protect: the Palestinians.

There was a time, not so long ago, when many Israelis believed that no Arab power would attack Jerusalem, for fear of damaging the holy sites sacred to Islam. Moreover, there was a feeling that Arab powers would refrain from attacking both the holy city and the territories, in order to avoid Palestinian casualties.

But long-held taboos governing the actions of Muslim fighters have been bent, broken and discarded with impunity in recent years. In Iraq, the February bombing of the Al-Askari mosque, one of the holiest of all shrines to Shi'ites ? apparently at the hands of an Al-Qaida cell - was followed within a day by reprisal attacks on no fewer than 161 Sunni mosques.

Where Islamists once refrained from killing non-combatants, especially Muslims, the number of Muslim non-combatants killed in Iraq has grown so astronomically as to resist accurate count.

During the recent war in the north, nearly half of the Israeli civilians killed by Katyusha rockets fired by Iran's client militia Hezbollah, were Arabs.

Under certain circumstances, might Iran sacrifice the Arabs of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, to say nothing of a million Muslim Israeli citizens, in a cataclysmic assault on the Zionist entity?

More directly, would Iran be willing to kill off millions of Arabs if that were the price of exterminating the state of Israel?

The truth, one wishes, were "No." But the real truth, one suspects, is "Not yet."

In recent decades, radical changes in warfare and radical re-interpretations of Koranic law suggest a growing willingness among Islamic extremists, clerics at their head, to justify the killing of Muslim bystanders in a suicide bombing.

In the phrase of New York University Prof. Noah Feldman, writing in the New York Times Magazine last month, the prevailing ideology of suicide bombing holds that the "involuntary martyrdom" of Muslim bystanders killed in a suicide bombing is viewed as "no less glorious for being unintentional."

In the future, Feldman notes, "the logic of sacrificing other Muslims against their own wills could be extended to the national level."

Were an Islamic state to use nuclear weapons against Israel or other Western targets, "the guaranteed retaliation would cost the lives of thousands and maybe millions of Muslims. But following the logic of suicide bombing, the original bomber might reason that those Muslims would die in God's grace and that others would live on to fight the jihad."

Feldman stresses that no state in the Muslim world has adopted this view. "But after 9/11," he adds, "we can no longer treat the possibility as fanciful."

A number of analysts have suggested that at present, the most effective deterrent to a large-scale Iranian attack on Israel, is Iran's fundamental wish to continue to survive.

Although Shi'ite positions and those of Ahmadinejad are seen as more potentially apocalyptic that those of Osama Bin Laden and of the Sunnis, the cagey Iranian regime has played the rest of the world with the skill and the outlook of a poker master who wants to stay in the game for good.

Should future events take a turn for the very worst, however, and an all-out Iranian attack on the Holy Land appear imminent, perhaps Tehran will issue the kind of recommendation to Palestinians that Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah delivered to Haifa's Arab population during the war - warning them to leave town so that Hezbollah gunners could step up rocket attacks without shedding the blood of fellow Muslims.

"I have a special message to the Arabs of Haifa, to your martyrs and to your wounded. I call on you to leave this city. I hope you do this," Nasrallah said.

"Please leave so we don't shed your blood, which is our blood."



chalabi

BAGHDAD'Chickenhawk Intelligence Agency' Is Born

A week after Wolfowitz's "premature" war pitch, Richard Perle convened a session of the Defense Policy Board addressed by British Arab Bureau veteran spook Dr. Bernard Lewis, and INC founder Dr. Ahmed Chalabi, a bank swindler and protégé of Albert Wohlstetter at the University of Chicago, who was the Zionist Lobby and the Israeli right wing's hand-picked successor to Saddam Hussein. At the CIA and the State Department, Chalabi was considered virtually persona non grata, and his INC umbrella was viewed as a collection of martini-slurping professional exiles, with virtually no assets on the ground inside Iraq. Perle and Bernard Lewis had been introduced to Chalabi in the early 1980s, and the former banker, who faces a 20-year prison sentence in Jordan for bank fraud and currency manipulation, has been a pet project of JINSA and AEI ever since.

In a candid moment shortly before Sept. 11, 2001, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had confided to associates that he was thinking about resigning his Cabinet post and returning to Chicago. His explanation was revealing: "The Likud has taken over the building," he told friends, referring to the Wolfowitz-Perle cabal that had run circles around him in the early months of the "Bush 43" Administration. Sources familiar with Rumsfeld describe the Secretary as a "control freak" and micro-manager, who had presumed that his participation in a Clinton-era commission on missile proliferation had sufficiently offset his quarter-century absence from Washington, and that he would be able to maintain a tight grip on the vast Pentagon bureaucracy, including the uniformed military command, centered at the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Through the personal efforts of former Secretary of State and "Chicago School" ideologue George Shultz, Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz had been inserted in the inner circle of George W. Bush campaign policy tutors, the so-called "Vulcans," which enabled him to bring Perle and the whole neo-con crowd to Austin, Texas for personal mis-education sessions with the President-to-be. Wolfowitz parlayed that personal relationship with the new President, and staffed Rumsfeld's office with a veritable army of like-minded Strauss disciples and Likudniks.

In June 1988, EIR had revealed that then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger's general counsel office had compiled a list of suspected members of the "X Committee," the network of Israeli spies and agents-of-influence who had penetrated the Reagan-Bush Administration's national security establishment, and were believed to have directed the espionage efforts of Jonathan Jay Pollard. Among the dozen leading "X Committee" suspects being probed by the general counsel team were: Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Wohlstetter, Fred Iklé, Stephen Bryen, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, John Lehman, and Henry Rowen.

Under Wolfowitz, the "Bush 43" Pentagon once again became a hub of "X Committee" influence and penetration.

Nevertheless, the intelligence coming out of the CIA, the DIA, and the State Department firmly rejected any evidence of linkage between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of 9/11. The overwhelming evidence also suggested that Iraq posed no immediate or near-term threat to the United States or any of its neighbors. Early in the Bush Administration, Secretary of State Colin Powell had proposed a revision of sanctions, called "smart sanctions," recognizing that international support for the continuing isolation of Iraq was wearing thin.

To seize upon the dramatic shift that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, Wolfowitz and Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, one of the most rabid of the Jabotinskyites in the Pentagon civilian bureaucracy, launched a secret intelligence unit. Its mission was to provide Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld—who had abandoned his pre-9/11 plans to retire, and was now fully in synch with the Wolfowitz cabal—with a constant flow of "intelligence" to counter the CIA/DIA resistance to the "Get Saddam" agenda of the "Clean Break" crowd. One of the principal sources of this unvetted "intelligence" was to be Chalabi's discredited INC.

Wolfowitz and Feith chose Abram Shulsky to head the secret cell, which was buried in the maze of civilian Pentagon bureaucracy under the Assistant Secretary for Policy. A Strauss disciple, Shulsky had been a professional staffer for Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), along with Elliott Abrams and Gary Schmitt—now the President of Bill Kristol's and Robert Kagan's tax-front, PNAC. Shulsky had served on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee. He had been an underling of neo-con wunderkind and Iran-Contra operative Roy Godson at the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, a project of the New York City-based National Strategy Information Center. And Shulsky had co-authored, with Zalmay Khalilzad and others, a 1999 RAND Corporation study, "The United States and a Rising China," which promoted the idea that China, more than any other nation, posed a direct challenge to American global and regional military primacy, and would have to be directly confronted.

Who Makes This 'Intelligence'?
Others identified with the Shulsky "chickenhawks intelligence agency" included:

Harold Rhode, the Middle East specialist in Dr. Andrew Marshall's Pentagon Office of Net Assessments (ONA). Marshall was a founder, with Albert Wohlstetter, of the RAND Corporation at the close of World War II. He was installed at the Pentagon in 1975 by then-Secretary of Defense James Rodney Schlesinger, who created the ONA specifically to house Marshall and his team of RAND systems analysis and game theory utopians. At the very outset of the "Bush 43" Administration, Marshall had grabbed the ear of Rumsfeld, provoking a near revolt of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who considered Marshall to be the driver behind the dangerously incompetent "revolution in military affairs."

Michael Ledeen, in his recent book-length rant, The War Against the Terror Masters (New York: St. Martins Press, 2002), described Rhode as his "guru on the Middle East for nearly 20 years." In 1991, Rhode was in the Pentagon Office of International Security Policy, covering Turkey, at a time that Perle and Feith were running an international consulting operation, selling Israeli military hardware to the Turkish Army. Wolfowitz has described Rhode as his "Islamic affairs advisor" at ONA; and according to one account, Rhodes, in a meeting during the early months of the Bush Administration, had staged a noisy in-your-face confrontation with a top Saudi official, vowing that the historical U.S.-Saudi partnership was a thing of the past. The incident reportedly cost Rhode a more senior—and visible—post inside the Wolfowitz-Feith Pentagon bureaucracy.

Rhode, according to several sources, has travelled, on several occasions, to London, with Richard Perle, Chairman, until recently, of the Defense Policy Board, to gather "intelligence" from INC officials, which has been funneled through Shulsky's shop to Rumsfeld—without first being evaluated and cross-checked by CIA or Defense Intelligence Agency professionals.

William Luti, formerly an advisor to Vice President Cheney, more recently named as the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Special Plans and Near East and South Asian Affairs, has been described by a recent visitor to his office as a man crazed with the mission to eliminate Saddam Hussein. "He reminded me of a serial killer, right out of a Hollywood horror flick," according to the source, who described Luti's Pentagon office as covered from floor to ceiling with desecrated photographs and news clippings of Saddam Hussein and his inner core. A retired Navy Captain and pilot who served during Operation Desert Storm, Luti was described, in a March 11, 2002 New Yorker story by Seymour Hersh, as "so obsessed with an immediate overthrow of Saddam Hussein that he hasn't thought through the consequences." Despite these psychological profiles, Luti has been one of the Pentagon civilian point-men, working with the Iraqi "opposition" on both intelligence and operations. According to accounts in the New York Times, Luti was dispatched to London in November and December 2002, to meet with Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles.

On Dec. 17, Luti and Maj. Gen. David Barno met secretely with 11 Iraqi opposition figures in London, and selected the initial group of Iraqis to be trained in Hungary to participate in any military operation, as the indigenist "window dressing" on what would, in reality, be an all-American or Anglo-American military invasion.

In a Washington speech on Oct. 16, 2002, Luti had promoted, aggressively, the need for the United States to adopt a new, imperial interventionist policy, which he dubbed "anticipatory self-defense."

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a retired CIA officer, has been identified as one of the secret liaisons between the Shulsky "chickenhawk intelligence agency" at DOD and the Iraqi oppositionists in London and elsewhere in Europe. Based most of the time in Brussels, along with Robert Kagan, Gerecht is a senior fellow at AEI, and is the Director of the Middle East Initiative at PNAC, working directly under Kristol, Kagan, and Shulsky's close associate Gary Schmitt.