One of Ours

Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan has been [fired] after the newspaper's board said that pictures of soldiers abusing Iraqis were a "calculated and malicious hoax".

A statement from publishers Trinity Mirror said: "...there is now sufficient evidence to suggest that these pictures are fakes and that the Daily Mirror has been the subject of a calculated and malicious hoax."

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Mr Morgan's resignation follows yesterday's statement to MPs by Adam Ingram, the Armed Forces minister, that the photos "were categorically not taken in Iraq".

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The Queen's Lancashire Regiment (QLR) said the Mirror had endangered British troops by running the pictures. Roger Goodman, of the QLR, said the regiment now felt "vindicated". Mr Goodman added: "It is just a great pity it has taken so long... and that so much damage has been done in the meantime."

In accordance with the brutal accounting of modern combat, cash payments were made Thursday to people in this small village who suffered during recent fighting between U.S. Marines and insurgents in nearby Fallouja.

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Now that the fighting between Marines and insurgents has tapered off in the area, the U.S. military is attempting to make amends with noncombatants who suffered. The Americans hope cash will win friends and help bring peace in this part of the volatile Sunni Triangle.

Under Marine rules, a payment for a death goes directly to the family. Payments for community losses can be funneled through an elder, sheik or village leader.

“I know we cannot replace your loss, but we would like to offer a small apology in the form of $2,500 so we can move on in friendship,” Capt. Kevin Coughlin, judge advocate general for the 2nd Battalion, 1st Regiment, 1st Marine Division, told the man who said his daughter had been killed.

“I accept your apology,” said Saady Mohamed Abdala.

Whether his daughter was killed by fire from Marines or insurgents — or whether the man even had a daughter — was not entirely clear.

“There’s really no way to verify these accounts,” Coughlin said. “It’s really irrelevant. In making these payments, the U.S. is not taking responsibility for the loss, only offering an apology for a loss that occurred as a result of combat operations.”...

...I want to ask those who say ‘OBL is supported by the united states and he does whatever they want’ AND ‘ they bombed their own buildings in Sep.11 using Osama bin Laden to justify a war in any country they want to occupy’ !!! as that idiot who’s one of Muqtada’s thugs when the LBC channel asked him about Al-Qaeda and OBL and terrorists’ attacks, the idiot interrupted by saying ‘I don’t believe in a man called OBL’ !!!! the announcer surprised ‘ what about the Sep 11 attacks and ...’ .. ‘ I don’t believe’ he replied..!

There are many idiots like this one all over the world ! I don’t know how they explain their ‘great belief’..

However, let’s talk about our new mini-OBL in a new style; Muqtada, the beloved leader of thieves and murders, his man in Basra ( the monkey.. AlBahadli) announced that they need ‘brave’ men to commit suicide attacks, and they are waiting for them in Al-Sadr office there..

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The people are upset from what M.’s thugs are doing.. I was always saying ‘ I want the fight to continue in order to get rid of those thieves’ but I also say ‘ they are tens of thousands, how can the American troops kill them all?’ ..I think the best way now is to arrest or kill the insane first then killing his followers..

Now, M’s thugs are in Al-Najaf, exactly in the cemetery which witnessed a part of the uprising in 1991 against the ex-regime, Saddam, the specialist in such things, killed and buried them all in few days! Including women and children.. Now, Muqtada’s men are trying to do the same thing, because they know very well that the united states never do what Saddam had committed, and so they are using the shrines as shields..

In Falluja the insurgents were using the Mosques and now the thieves are using the cemetery then when anything happened to the tombs ( arranged and built in a way that let those men have very good places to hide!) The clerics and people shown on the Arabic channels crying for that, and the poor Americans are always the victims.. I bet those thugs will fire at the tombs and shrines, because they trust in the Arab media and the foolish people..

M’s thieves took over the police station there and robbed all the arms and ammo....I don’t know how we’ll be able to rule this country after June 30, we need the United States for support...

...The idea that anyone would suggest that Donald Rumsfeld — and now Richard Meyers! — should step down, in the midst of a global war, for the excesses and criminality of a handful of miscreant guards and their lax immediate superiors in the cauldron of Iraq is absurd and depressing all at once.

What would we think now if George Marshall had been forced out on news that 3,000 miles away George S. Patton's men had shot some Italian prisoners, or Gen. Hodges's soldiers summarily executed German commandoes out of uniform, or drivers of the Red Ball express had raped French women? Should Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell have been relieved from his command for the February 12-13, 1991, nocturnal bombing of the Al Firdos compound in Baghdad, in which hundreds of women and children of Baathist loyalists were tragically incinerated and pictures of their corpses broadcast around the world, prompting the United States to cease all further pre-planned and approved attacks on the elite in Saddam's bunkers throughout Baghdad? Of course not.

Rumsfeld and Meyers have presided over two amazingly successful wars. In an aggregate of 11 weeks, and at the tragic cost of 700 combat dead, the American military defeated the two worst regimes in the Middle East and stayed on to implant democratic change where no such idea has ever existed. Had anyone envisioned, say in 1999, that the United States could do such a thing — that Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar would both be out of power, and that governing councils would be there in their place — he would have been dismissed as unhinged...

... the transformation of Afghanistan and Iraq has always been the most audacious, the most dangerous, and, yes, the most idealistic American effort since the end of World War II — one that alone had the chance of ending the quarter-century-long terrorist assault against the United States...

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Winners usually loot the infrastructure of the losing side. They are rarely confronted with the sudden specter of the defeated carting away their own national treasure at the first sign of magnanimity, while global television both damns the Americans for allowing it to happen and warns them not to "shoot civilians" to prevent it. Most of Europe was happy enough with a "secular" Saddam Hussein, an embargoed and desperate thug who could only pay for his imported junk by mortgaging his oil fields to French and Russian consortia. Even the U.N. "humanists" made money off of him at the expense of his hungry citizenry.

...we are not [supposed] to say anything of some 5-6 million Kurds who have a democratic republic and are quite happy with their salvation through American intervention and support.

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Yes, there are thousands of prisoners in the jails of Iraq — but not hundreds of thousands in recent graves. And that is precisely because the warcraft of Rumsfeld and Meyers was rightly targeted, measured, and humane — and even in war did not seek massive annihilation of the enemy (although, in the brutal arithmetic of war, that ensures a better chance of successful occupation later on).

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The amazing thing remains not that we have seen a depressing year of chaos, but that the forces of change are still in our favor after all of our setbacks and often mistaken assumptions. In Iraq, regardless of what The New Yorker or the New York Times attests, the stuff of life — electricity, water, food — is far more accessible than before. We see nightly bombings and chaos, but even CNN cannot hide in its background shots stores open, people speaking freely on the street, and the economy taking off.

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...Indeed, there are two constants in this war: Every time the United States engages the enemy it wins, and every time Iraqis are given a chance at a secure, peaceful local election they act responsibly and eschew candidates of violence and hate. Unless those facts change, America will win the peace. If we will fight more aggressively in the shadows while the new government basks in the light of success, the miracle of Iraq will come to pass — and it simply would not have without the likes of a Donald Rumsfeld.

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One final jarring scene from the televised spectacles was the image of the lone, beleaguered Joe Lieberman calling for patience and sobriety, and worried about our troops in the field and the pulse of the war. This decent and honest man reminds us of what the present party of Ted Kennedy and Terry McAuliff used to be. The confidence of a Truman, JFK, and Scoop Jackson...is now nowhere to be found.

...it would be ironic to see what the present prescient critics are going to say — much less do — when they confront the hideous reality that Iran and perhaps Syria will have acquired nuclear weapons and with them the ability, without a neighboring nuclear India staring them down, to blackmail most of the Middle East and the oil-hungry world at large.

We will soon learn what Middle Eastern nuclear honor, atomic loss of face, or radioactive jihad really means. Most who now damn unilateralism and preemption won't find their beloved but shaken U.N., EU, or NATO at their side...

"Most Democrats and Republicans, including President Bush and Sen. Kerry, agree that we must successfully finish what we have started in Iraq. Now is the time for all who share that goal to make our agreement publicly clear, to stress what unites us. Many argue that we can only rectify the wrongs done in the Iraqi prisons if Donald Rumsfeld resigns. I disagree. Unless there is clear evidence connecting him to the wrongdoing, it is neither sensible nor fair to force the resignation of the secretary of defense, who clearly retains the confidence of the commander in chief, in the midst of a war. I have yet to see such evidence. Secretary Rumsfeld's removal would delight foreign and domestic opponents of America's presence in Iraq."

...Though fighting did not reach the shrines of Hussein or Abbas, American soldiers were forced to fight insurgents holed up in the Mukhaiyam shrine, a domed building next to a high school and near the Mukhaiyam Mosque. Militiamen had regrouped at the shrine in the middle of the fighting and had begun launching mortars from there at the American-occupied mosque. Special Forces soldiers led teams of Iraqi commandos to the area and drove the insurgents from the shrine during an intense firefight.

The two dozen or so Iraqi commandos who helped the Americans in the battle were part of the Iraqi Counter Terrorist Force, trained in Jordan to combat insurgents. They acted under the supervision of Special Forces, who instructed them on clearing munitions from the Mukhaiyam Mosque and shrine and from the high school. Special Forces soldiers guided much of the battle on the ground, storming the mosque and setting up a base there to direct troops....