Iraq bomb attack kills 14 marines

Fourteen marines and their civilian translator have been killed in a roadside bombing in north-western Iraq, the US military says. It is one of the deadliest attacks on US forces since the 2003 invasion. It happened near the city of Haditha, in the same area as an incident on Monday in which six US marines were killed by hostile fire, the army said. The city is near the Syrian border in an area that has seen frequent insurgent assaults against US troops. The bomb is reported to have exploded near an amphibious assault vehicle travelling south of Haditha. One other marine was wounded.

One of Iraq's most violent Islamic militant groups, Ansar al-Sunna, has claimed responsibility for the attack on marines on Monday, saying it had killed eight personnel. The group said it had shot some of the marines and "slit the throats" of others. A ninth marine is said to have been captured although it is not possible to authenticate the statement.

At least 37 US military personnel have been killed in Iraq in the last 10 days, a period of intense violence, but the latest Haditha attack ranks among the biggest US losses. Last December, 14 US troops and four civilian contractors died in a suicide bombing targeting a military base in Mosul. Only air crashes, with or without hostile fire, have resulted in higher US death tolls, including 16 in the November 2003 loss of a Chinook helicopter near Falluja and 31 in a helicopter crash in January 2005 near the Jordanian border.

Pacifying Iraq's western Anbar province, where Haditha is located, is a top priority for US forces. Officials say stability and political progress cannot be secured unless anti-US fighters are rooted out of the region.

As Fox News tells it, at the very moment the British police were supposedly looking high and low for Dewsbury resident Haroon Rashid Aswat, pegged as the London bombing “mastermind,” MI-6 was quietly stowing him away for safe keeping. In fact, they were protecting him as an asset, although we should not expect Fox News to admit this “embarrassing” fact. “The Times said Aswat was believed to have had a ten-year association with militant groups, and met Osama bin Laden at [a CIA-ISI built] al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan,” Breaking News reported almost two weeks ago. “The newspaper said it had obtained FBI documents indicating he was sent to America in 1999 where he had firearms and poison training.”

According to MI-5 counter-intelligence whistleblower David Shayler, “MI-6 is in bed with al Qaeda,” which of course makes perfect sense since al-Qaeda is a masterfully engineered intelligence contrivance (a fake terrorist front organization created through a collaboration between the CIA, ISI, and MI-6) designed to discredit Islam, sow violence and chaos, and bury any possibility of pan-Arab nationalism—or, as the Grand Chessboard master Zbigniew Brzezinski writes, “to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”

In 2002, “Tony Blair … ordered a D-Notice [an institutionalized method of censorship, short for short for Defense Notices] on British media reporting government officials signing court gag orders. This regards the case of former MI5 officer David Shayler, who has evidence to prove MI6 gave £100,000 to bin Laden and Al-Qaeda,” Paul Joseph Watson noted, citing an article published in the Guardian. Another famous Londonistan radical, Abu Qatada (accused of being a key al-Qaeda member) was sheltered in a safe house in northern England by MI-6, the BBC reported in 2002. And then there is the story of British intelligence forking out large sums of money to “an al-Qaeda cell in Libya in a doomed attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi in 1996 and thwarted early attempts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice,” the London Observer reported in November, 2002.

In the non-Bushzarro world, Britain would be placed on the State Department’s list of nations supporting international terrorism (and attacked like Iraq was, although Iraq did not shelter terrorists). For instance, Britain provided “exceptional leave” to the Saudi expatriate Mohammed al-Massari, the head of the London-based Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights, after he declared as “intellectually justified” the attack on a U.S. military barracks in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American soldiers. Gamaa al-Islamiya (Islamic Group), the terrorist organization responsible for killing 62 tourists in Luxor, Egypt, was provided political asylum in Britain and numerous efforts by the Egyptian government to have members extradited were denied. The Algerian Armed Islamic Group, responsible for the assassination of Algerian President Mohamed Boudiaf on June 29, 1992, has its international headquarters in London. In addition, various other groups—including the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Hamas, the Kurdish Workers Party, al-Jihad, and others—operate out of the United Kingdom unmolested.

For Fox News, the presence of Haroon Rashid Aswat and radical clerics in Britain is nothing short of “appeasement,” when in fact it is part and parcel of a deliberate policy to undermine Islamic countries and discredit Arab nationalism, a long-standing effort to keep the “Mideast pot boiling,” as Joseph Brewda characterizes British intelligence-terrorist operations. “There is every reason to believe,” writes Webster Griffin Tarpley, “that London is one of the main recruiting grounds for patsies, dupes, fanatics, double agents, and other roustabouts of the terrorist scene” (9/11: Synthetic Terror, p. 156).

“British intelligence nurtures and cultivates—as it learned to do during its official colonial days and as it did with stunning success in southern Sudan for instance—an identity based on rigid ethnic or religious lines that fixates on the alleged difference between the victim population and perceived ‘enemy’ populations,” writes Linda de Hoyos. “In Africa, British intelligence focuses on stirring up tribal conflicts. In the Indian subcontinent, it focuses on religious or caste or ethnic differences. In the Caucasus and Balkans, religious and ethnic differences are played upon. In the global strategic arena, the British field such concepts as ‘clash of civilizations’”…. Naturally, British intelligence or its subcontractors will tend to back all sides in a conflict—since the conflict, NOT the victory of any one side—is the goal.”

In short, British state-sponsored terrorism is a perfect example of the Hegelian dialect in action. “The Hegelian dialectic has never failed because to understand it requires the total breakdown and reconstruction of everything you’ve ever known,” explains Paul Joseph Watson. “Upon the conclusion of the war on terrorism, the counterfeit foe awaits.”

Fox plays a crucial role—although the obvious role of Britain (working in tandem with intelligence operations out of Rumsfeld’s Pentagon) has posed a conundrum for the preeminent Bush Ministry of Disinformation and Lies, enshrined in its “fair and balanced” mythos. Instead of facing up to the reality behind the current situation in London, Fox’s talking heads and propaganda meisters spin a transparent web of deceit and fanciful alternate realities (as the dicta of Bushzarro world demands), all of it suffering miserably (and ludicrously) under the hard glare of truth.