News roundup, 24 June 2025

- Iran has launched attacks on American bases in Iraq and Qatar in retaliation for the US attacks on their nuclear sites. They now say they want to avoid further escalation. There is speculation, however, that they could close off the Strait of Hormuz, which would have significant effects on the availability and price of fossil fuels as about 20% of oil and gas globally is sent through that strait. There were some reports indicating that there might be a ceasefire in the works but this remains in doubt and the two countries continue to exchange attacks despite Trump's admonitions not to.

- Ukrainian and Polish authorities say that they have uncovered a plot to assassinate Volodymyr Zelenskyy on a state visit to Poland. The plot allegedly involved a "deep cover" agent who was recruited decades ago. This follows the discovery of another such plot last year, which apparently involved insiders in Ukraine's State Guard Department.

- The state of emergency issued in Manitoba at the end of May due to wildfires has been lifted due to improvements in conditions and success in containing the fires; however the situation remains volatile with several uncontained fires still burning in the north.

- Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi will be entering the legislature after winning a seat in the constituency of Edmonton-Strathcona in one of three byelections held in the province yesterday. Gurtej Singh Brar also appears to have won Edmonton-Ellerslie for the NDP, while the UCP's Tara Sawyer has been elected in Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills.

- Following the police-involved death of a Saulteax teenager, Neil Stonechild in 1990, someone named Candis McLean self-published a book entitled When Police Become Prey which disputed the findings of an inquiry into Stonechild's death. McLean has just won a defamation lawsuit against University of Regina professor Michelle Stewart who called the book "racist garbage". The judge may have been bound by some sort of legal precedent to make that finding, however it's worth noting that instead of the $165,642 in damages sought by McLean, he awarded her only $6,450.

British troops may face war crimes trials

Maybe there's a smidgen of justice out there somewhere:

A number of British military interrogators may face war crimes charges after members of their unit filmed themselves while threatening and abusing Iraqi detainees at a secret prison near Basra, the high court heard today.

The men have been referred to the Director of Service Prosecutions (DSP) after an investigation considered whether they had breached the International Criminal Court Act, which prohibits war crimes.

From the Guardian.

U.S. troops overwhelmingly support clean energy legislation

The heads must be exploding at Fox News:

Recently, a persuasive new poll conducted by VoteVets.org, shows that 73% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans support clean energy and climate change legislation.

In addition, 70% believe that ending our dependence on foreign oil is critical to our national security.

“This poll confirms what we always knew was true. Veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan know first-hand, the destructive effect our dependence on oil has on our national security, and on the battlefield,” said Jon Soltz, Iraq War Veteran and Chairman of VoteVets.org.

Source. Makes sense to me...

US spy drone videos 'hacked'

Pretty clever if it's true:

Fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan have been able to use low cost software downloaded from the internet to hack into live video feeds from unmanned US surveillance aircraft, a military official has said.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior US defence official told the Associated Press the fighters could view feeds from Predator drones - the US military's eyes in the sky for intelligence gathering - but could not take control of the aircraft or jam its electronic signals.

The fighters reportedly used software that costs less than $30 to hack into the video feed from the drones.

From Al Jazeera.

Bush spoke of supernatural beings in discussions with Chirac

Krikey:

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

Source.

Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq

Purple Library Guy at pogge has located this:

On November 27 the Iraqi parliament voted by a large majority in favor of a security agreement with the US under which the 150,000 American troops in Iraq will withdraw from cities, towns and villages by June 30, 2009 and from all of Iraq by December 31, 2011. The Iraqi government will take over military responsibility for the Green Zone in Baghdad, the heart of American power in Iraq, in a few weeks time. Private security companies will lose their legal immunity. US military operations and the arrest of Iraqis will only be carried out with Iraqi consent. There will be no US military bases left behind when the last US troops leave in three years time and the US military is banned in the interim from carrying out attacks on other countries from Iraq.
The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), signed after eight months of rancorous negotiations, is categorical and unconditional. America’s bid to act as the world’s only super-power and to establish quasi-colonial control of Iraq, an attempt which began with the invasion of 2003, has ended in failure. There will be a national referendum on the new agreement next July, but the accord is to be implemented immediately so the poll will be largely irrelevant. Even Iran, which had furiously denounced the first drafts of the SOFA saying that they would establish a permanent US presence in Iraq, now says blithely that it will officially back the new security pact after the referendum. This is a sure sign that Iran, as America’s main rival in the Middle East, sees the pact as marking the final end of the US occupation and as a launching pad for military assaults on neighbours such as Iran.

So it's all over -- except for the tiny fact that lots more Iraqis and Americans are going to die senselessly in the next three years, and the US will continue to accumulate more debt as well as more antipathy from the rest of humanity.

Harper lifts Howard's speech

As aka Mycroft said at babble, small minds think alike:



I hate to say this, but kudos to the Liberals for finding this. And as others have already noted, the big story is not the alleged plagiarism, but the possibility that both Harper and Howard were reading from the same script, straight off Karl Rove's desk.

Anthrax scientist commits suicide as FBI closes in

Well, that's the official story, anyway:

A U.S. military scientist committed suicide as federal prosecutors readied an indictment alleging he mailed anthrax-laced letters in 2001 in what authorities said Friday may have been a bizarre attempt to test a vaccine for the deadly poison.

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, worked at the army's biodefence labs at Fort Detrick, Md., for 18 years until his death on Tuesday.

He had a long history of homicidal threats, according to papers recently filed in local court by a social worker.

Letters containing anthrax powder turned up at congressional offices, newsrooms and elsewhere weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, killing five and sending numerous victims to hospitals with anthrax poisoning.

From here. There are a few curious things about this story; the one that initially leaped out at me was this:

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland. Tom Ivins, a brother of the scientist, told the Associated Press that his other brother, Charles, had told him that Bruce committed suicide and Tylenol might have been involved. The Los Angeles Times, which first reported that Ivins was under suspicion, said the scientist had taken a massive dose of a prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine.

Now maybe this is true. However, that seems to me to be an unlikely way for a biologist to commit suicide. If the codeine kills you, great- but if it doesn't, you're likely to die much more slowly, as your liver shuts down from the effects of the Tylenol. And Ivins would likely have known that. Of course, a severely despondent person might not be thinking clearly enough, so there's some plausibility... but one has to wonder.

Glen Greenwald has a great deal more on Ivins' death:

We now know -- we knew even before news of Ivins' suicide last night, and know especially in light of it -- that the anthrax attacks didn't come from Iraq or any foreign government at all. It came from our own Government's scientist, from the top Army bioweapons research laboratory. More significantly, the false reports linking anthrax to Iraq also came from the U.S. Government -- from people with some type of significant links to the same facility responsible for the attacks themselves.

Surely the question of who generated those false Iraq-anthrax reports is one of the most significant and explosive stories of the last decade. The motive to fabricate reports of bentonite and a link to Saddam is glaring. Those fabrications played some significant role -- I'd argue a very major role -- in propagandizing the American public to perceive of Saddam as a threat, and further, propagandized the public to believe that our country was sufficiently threatened by foreign elements that a whole series of radical policies that the neoconservatives both within and outside of the Bush administration wanted to pursue -- including an attack an Iraq and a whole array of assaults on our basic constitutional framework -- were justified and even necessary in order to survive.

So it does make you wonder, doesn't it? If Ivins was party to this deception, or simply was aware of it, it might be a wee bit awkward if he were about to be cross-examined in court. Maybe someone decided to make sure that didn't happen...

George Galloway on The O'Reilly Factor

He's not intimidated at all. Just watch how he handles this.

Via thwap.