War / Peace

Visiting professor of public health epidemiology at Oxford University, Klim McPherson, notes that while the British government has criticized estimates that put the number of Iraqi casualties of the war at 100,000, a defence ministry group has been slow to produce a better estimate. "Electorates, in Iraq and elsewhere, have a right to know. To procrastinate further for no good reason is to devalue public health processes, not to mention Iraqi lives.

At the trespassing trial of activists protesting the School of the Americas combat training base, "new information surfaced about a comprehensive plan devised by the U.S. Army to deflect criticism of the school, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation." Defendant Aaron Shuman introduced as evidence WHINSEC's "Strategic Communications Campaign Plan," which he obtained from an Army public affairs officer.

With "regime change" in Iran receiving renewed attention in Congress, "new exiled Iranian opposition groups backed by some of Washington's neoconservatives are springing up in the hope of seeing large doses of U.S. funding," reports the Financial Times.

"In April 2004," writes Mariah Blake, "a former U.S. Special Forces soldier named Jonathan Keith Idema started shopping a sizzling story to the media. He claimed terrorists in Afghanistan planned to use bomb-laden taxicabs to kill key U.S. and Afghan officials, and that he himself intended to thwart the attack. ...