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More than 100,000 Iraqis have died - and where is our shame and rage? The full scale of the human cost already paid for the war on Iraq is only now becoming clear. Last week's estimate by investigators, using credible methodology, that more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians - most of them women and children - have died since the US-led invasion is a profound moral indictment of our countries. The US and British governments quickly moved to cast doubt on the Lancet medical journal findings, citing other studies. These mainly media-based reports put the number of Iraqi civilian deaths at...

James Bovard, the great libertarian champion of our freedom and civil liberties, recently shared with readers his mail from Bush supporters. For starters here are some of the salutations: "communist bastard," "asshole," "a piece of trash, scum of the earth." It goes downhill from there. Bush’s supporters demand lock-step consensus that Bush is right. They regard truthful reports that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and was not involved in the September 11 attack on the US – truths now firmly established by the Bush administration’s own reports – as treasonous America-bashing. As well, Bovard is interpreted as...

WITH THE release last month of the report by the Senate Select Committee on intelligence and Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, John Kerry was handed a gift that rarely occurs in a major political race: the chance to underscore a major failing on the part of an opponent. The committee found that there was no intelligence data to sustain President Bush's oft-cited reason for last year's invasion of Iraq -- the presence of WMDs and ongoing projects dedicated to their manufacture. Kerry said that the Bush administration had been "wrong, and soldiers lost their lives because they were wrong."

Time.com September 14, 2002 Q: Some on the right call you the new Jane Fonda, and joke about what you'll call your exercise video.A: (Long pause?) Those on the right who say that disgrace the 12 years of service I gave to my country as a Marine. I love my country. I'll put my record of service up against anyone, bar none. If they want to have an exercise video then why don't they come here and say it to my face and I'll give'm an exercise video, which will be called, "Scott Ritter Kicking Their Ass." Q: Are you...

Paedophiles buying child pornography on the internet face having their credit cards withdrawn under radical new plans to crack down on child abuse. Officers from the national crime squad and the FBI are spearheading an international child protection force which will put pressure on credit card companies to ban internet paedophiles from holding cards in a bid to stop them paying to download images from websites. Other plans include: targeting the assets of organised crime gangs who run the websites, and monitoring conversations in internet chatrooms to stop paedophiles from grooming their victims over the web. The plans were discussed...

'Sarin Bomb!' v The Dud Heard Round the World by Scott Ritter from the May 21, 2004 edition Iraq sarin shell is not part of a secret cache By Scott Ritter DELMAR, N.Y. v In the mid-1980s I served as the intelligence officer for a Marine artillery battalion. Stationed in Twentynine Palms, Calif., I would often find myself deployed in the field, on exercises where thousands of live artillery rounds were fired downrange. In keeping with the Marine artillery motto of "shoot, move, communicate," we were always moving from one firing location to another to simulate modern war. This mobility...

First, the shell was announced by BG Kimmitt, the CPA military spokesman, and he was reporting an announcement by the Iraq Survey Group (ISG). During the press conference, he said ... that the round was an old binary shell, and described its function - two components contained within the shell that are mixed by the action of firing the shell, and that since the shell wasn't fired, but used in an IED, the mixing was not complete, only a small amount of sarin was produced, and a couple of soldiers (EOD) were affected. Field testing showed sarin, and not said...

Wednesday, May 19, 2004 No Peace for Oil By Michael P. Tremoglie and Chris Blackburn FrontPageMagazine.com | May 19, 2004 Next time there is a television newscast of an anti-Iraq war demonstration, imagine a voice saying: "This event is sponsored by Saddam Hussein and the United Nations." According to the latest reports from Baghdad, Washington, and New York, there is a good possibility that this is exactly what is occurring. The UN-administered Oil-for-Food program, which was originally designed to assist Iraqis who were starving because of the UN imposed economic sanctions of Saddam Hussein, was used as a slush fund...

UN-Eritrea row sinks to new low UN peacekeepers have been accused of severe crimes The UN has delivered an ultimatum to Eritrea after relations between the two sunk to a new low. The UN said Eritrea must cooperate with its peacekeeping force patrolling the border with Ethiopia, or else ask the UN to leave. The UN says its staff have been illegally detained, while Eritrea accuses the peacekeepers of serious crimes including paedophilia. Eritrea also claims the UN is destabilising the region. The UN Mission to Ethiopia and Eritrea (Unmee) patrols a 1,000km (620 mile) border between the two Horn...

I have seen posts here, unlinked and unsourced, that Scott Ritter is a lobbyist for the Iraqi government. Ritter was on C-span's Morning Journal today, just prior to J. Biden's second day of hearings about the coming war on Iraq. "Scottie Boy" has some good points , it seems to me. He is an anti-Iraq-war Republican and ought to be heard and treated respectfully. I'm pro-invasion (who cares?).After an FR search, I cannot find anything to support accusations against Ritter though. Signed, W.T. I want information. Does anyone seriously charge that Ritter is a paid Iraqi lobbyist?

I think all of us should express our opinions to the local newspapers who are reporting Scott Ritter's speech tour. I have written to "The Leader" in Corning,NY, expressing my disgust at his appearance there and intend to follow his appearances and write to the local papers there. The Leader's website is: www.the-leader.com.

Scott Ritter will be at Corning West High, in NY tonight at 7:30. Sorry about the late notice, but we must get as many of us together as possible to protest him and the UN loving "Peaceful Gatherings" group. I called, and WETM-TV will be on hand, and seemed interested in showing the "other side" that we can provide. If you're interested in meeting up for this, email me, joe71284@yahoo.com

From a tangle of recent accusations about Iraqi oil profiteering and international deceit that stretches from Washington's Beltway to Baghdad, one name keeps popping up: Shakir Al-Khafaji, an Iraqi-born metro Detroiter [snip] The West Bloomfield father and Southfield business owner has become entangled in a simmering scandal that now threatens to overtake the United Nations' biggest humanitarian mission, the oil-for-food program. Hearings were held this week in Congress following a congressional report earlier this month that said that much of the money generated by the program was skimmed off before it reached the Iraqi people. [snip] The GAO estimated that...

Former U. N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter has spent the past few years imagining himself a great geopolitical riddle, independent and unfathomable. Like a half-baked military version of Arianna Huffington, he made his fame as a flamboyant dissenter. Now, revelations about a benefactor may force him to stop playing Peter Pan and grow up: It's time for him to decide whether he wants to go down in history as a shill, or a tool. The big news (if sadly predictable) was the confirmation that the financier of Ritter's Iraq propaganda film "In Shifting Sands" was among an elite cabal that...

Scott Ritter, formerly the top United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, has long argued that claims that Saddam Hussein possessed biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programmes were massively exaggerated. His public campaign against the US-led invasion of Iraq made him a hated figure of the American right, which still demonises him as an apologist for the ousted Baghdad regime. Now, at the very moment when the absence of weapons of mass destruction in post-Saddam Iraq should make Mr Ritter feel vindicated, he faces new questions about his relationship with Baghdad after he quit his UN job in 1998. Mr Ritter...

I recently found some interesting articles about anthrax, the domestic theory, and Hatfill that gave me some new ideas to consider. Foremostly, I found that the first comments espousing the domestic theory often arose in the context of a war on Iraq, or finishing the war, depending on how you look at it. For years the government tried to build the consensus to getting rid of Saddam. Before and immediately after 9/11 Bush made it clear he wanted to complete the job. Interestingly the first voice after 9/11 against finishing off Iraq and dissuading consideration that the anthrax was Iraqi...

Greetings Freepers, et al: At this point I've collected a mountain of circumstantial evidence which indicates something very significant occurred on or about October 28, 1997. The event seriously undermined UNSCOM and changed the course of history. Given last week's revelation: "Ritter the pedophile wannabe," changed our frame of reference with Iraq, UNSCOM, and Ritter. Chances are some FReeper knows or is a former UNSCOM team member, or perhaps several FReeper lurkers each hold one piece to the Ritter puzzle. Collected and assembled here, we might see the big picture. So, I’m asking for Freeper help. Scott Ritter undergoes an...

Scott Ritter on Fox and Friends doesn't believe the anthrax is from Iraq but from "McVeigh" type "right wing" groups here in the USA.

<p>A year ago John Kerry described the nations that would liberate Iraq as a "coalition of the bribed, the coerced, the bought and the extorted." It turns out that may be a better description of his own antiwar camp. From Jacques Chirac's and Vladimir Putin's political cronies to Tony Blair's own Labour Party, many of the most vocal opponents of enforcing U.N. resolutions turn out to have been on the take.</p>

U.N. Weapons Inspector Reveals Personal Conversation with Kerry. Kerry, Too, Needs to Clear the Air On April 23, 1971, a 27-year-old Navy veteran named John Kerry sat before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and chided members on their leadership failures regarding the war in Vietnam. "Where is the leadership?" Kerry, a decorated hero who had proved his courage under fire, demanded of the senators. "Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned?" Kerry lambasted those who had pushed so strongly for war in Vietnam. "These men have left all the casualties and retreated...