Christian has been in Baghdad with Scott Fleming who published the story of this attack here as a slash US scoop last week.

As you know Baghdad is hell on earth, but we were only there for two weeks. Perhaps the craziest thing that happened to us was getting the middle of that massive fire fight in Baghdad on august 7th-- we were the first press on the scene and were just behind the US troop’s position for the whole fight. This is what happened.


We were coming back from an interview around 1 pm and were going to make a call at the Al Hambra. Once there we found the place totally vacated of press and the brassy old cig smoking Iraqi broad who controls the phone told me that the embassy had blown up. I tell the boys (G, Scott and Ahmed) and naturally we saddle up to rush down for a look, not expecting to see much as the event was many hours old.

"US Troops in Iraq Face Pay Cut"

Pentagon Says Tough Duty Bonuses are Budget-Buster

Edward Epstein, San Francisco Chronicle, August 14, 2003

Washington -- The Pentagon wants to cut the pay of its 148,000 U.S.
troops in Iraq, who are already contending with guerrilla-style
attacks, homesickness and 120- degree-plus heat.

Unless Congress and President Bush take quick action when Congress
returns after Labor Day, the uniformed Americans in Iraq and the
9,000 in Afghanistan will lose a pay increase approved last April of
$75 a month in "imminent danger pay" and $150 a month in "family
separation allowances."

"Iran-Contra, Amplified"

Jim Lobe, Asia Times

WASHINGTON - A specter of the Iran-Contra affair is haunting Washington. Even some of the people and countries are the same. And the methods -- particularly the pursuit by a network of well-placed individuals of a covert, parallel foreign policy that is at odds with official policy -- are definitely the same.

Recipe for the Destruction of a Hudna



Residents boast about the size and scope of Askar and Balata, "largest refugee camps in the West Bank"; Balata, birthplace of the intifada, Askar the less glorious cousin. But from the hundreds of stricken faces watching as they pulled the body out of the smoldering rubble it suddenly becomes clear that Askar is a very crowded small town of 13,000.

"Min"(who) they ask, looking as though they know the answer.
"Faez" The name travels rapidly through the crowd, heads go into hands among those digging and those scavenging and those collecting cloths and other salvageable items in makeshift sheet parachutes brought from neighboring houses.

This is not, of course, the first time the Israelis have broken the Hudna. There was the murder of little Machmoud Quabaya and the severing of his sisters arm by an `accidental' burst of machine gunfire into their car at the notorious checkpoint at Barta, a village trapped between the wall and the green line.
He is one of 11 palestinians killed in July, including extrajudicial
assasinations, the 280 wounded the 316 quietly arrested even as a few hundred others were released in the full glare of the flashbulbs. That is not even to mention the 100 house demolition orders in East Jerusalem alone, the land confiscations and the unconscionable progress of the suffocating apartheid wall through the farmlands and villages of the West Bank.

Rob writes:

A Home of Our Own

by Rob Eshelman



The ten-agorot coin has a map on it. Take a close look though and the map is not of Israel contained within its 1967 boarders. It is a map of a nation extending from the Nile River in the east to the Euphrates River in the west. This is 'Eretz Yisrael' which includes all of Jordan and parts of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Along the left curve of the coin the word “Israel� appears in Hebrew, Arabic, and English.



I'm told that sometimes when an Israeli home or road is being constructed these coins are dropped in the ground. Thus, the coin is both a reminder during every economic exchange of a people's homeland, and insurance that future generations will know whose land we are standing on.

nolympics submits

We spent the better part of this afternoon in the middle of a firefight. We left our hotel at around 1 pm, headed for the Jordanian embassy, which was hit by a car bomb early this morning.  As we drove out, we saw a tall column of thick black smoke rising straight up into the windless sky just a mile or two away.  We told our driver to turn around and we sped to the scene.  We were the first journalists there.

We found the smoke coming from the flattened skeleton of a US humvee, burning pathetically in the street.  There were two other vehicles in the convoy, another humvee and a 2-1/2 ton truck.  The soldiers in those vehicles were taking cover behind their rides and waiting for reinforcements. We hustled up just behind them and took cover on the sidewalk.  An al-Jazeera cameraman and a couple of others came in behind us.

"I'm in baghdad and it's sunday night. Today was perhaps the most bizarre, terrifying (although my traveling companions and I were never in any immediate danger), and mind-blowing day of my life. We left lovely amman at 4am and were in baghdad by about 3 pm. The landscape, physical, climatological, and cultural, changed so much that the night bore no resemblance to the morning. I can't possibly catalog it all, but i can give some impressions.

We crossed the border and headed into iraq at about 10 a.m. a gmc
suburban, the choice of foreign travelers, at $500 cash for the trip.
Perhaps 100 km into the western desert, and burned out cars appear by the roadside. a scorched ferrari said to have belonged to uday hussein, missiled to oblivion as one of his lieutenants tried to escape. Saddam's majestic 6-lane highway from jordan to baghdad, probably better than any US desert interstate, marked by scores of burn marks. A highway overpass with a gaping hole caused by a bomb, which we are told was aimed at a passenger bus. A few hundred yards later, the bus itself, utterly destroyed, the only visual comparison to one suicide-bombed in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"Answerable to No One"

John Chuckman, July 30, 2003

"…the writer should always be ready to change sides at the drop of a hat. He stands for the victims, and the victims change." Graham Greene

Anger over the abuse of power unavoidably drives my views. I can't explain why this should be so, and it doesn't truly matter why. It just is. So you might expect I would be glad to see a tyrant like Saddam Hussein receive even America's idea of justice.

But I'm not.

jim submits:

Pentagon Axes Online Terror Bets

BBC News

The Pentagon has abandoned plans to set up an online trading market to help predict terrorist attacks. Senator John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he had spoken by telephone to the programme's director "and we mutually agreed that this thing should be stopped".

Under the plan, bets could have been made about future terrorist attacks and other major political developments.

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"Bioweapons:

British Expert Leaves Impressive Arms Control Legacy"

Richard Stone, Science Magazine

CAMBRIDGE, U.K.--Earlier this week a senior judge was appointed to
lead an investigation into the reported suicide of biological weapons
expert David Kelly, a veteran of numerous inspections of former Soviet
bioweapons facilities and of 37 inspections in Iraq during the
1990s. Kelly had become embroiled in an ugly spat between the
government and the BBC over controversial news reports that officials
had "sexed up" intelligence reports on Iraq prior to the war. Kelly's
death closely followed the revelation last week that he was the
principal source of the BBC reports. The tragedy has left Kelly's
colleagues not only saddened but perplexed that someone who proved so
quietly determined in dealings with evasive officials in Russia and
Iraq could have become so boxed in.