Three-quarters of a century ago today - October 3, 1932 - British imperialists who had ruled Iraq on paper since the spoils-dividing Anglo-French Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 (and in reality since their victory in Baghdad against the Ottomans in 1917) gave up everything. Except for their military bases, their imposed oil contracts and their right of future intervention.

During their 383-year reign in the region that today we call Iraq, the Ottoman autocrats established three provinces that reflected divisions reaching back 900 years to the Islamic conquest of Mesopotamia: Kurdish Mosul, Sunni Baghdad, Shiite Basra. In their far briefer rule, the British first administered two provinces, Baghdad and Basra, getting Mosul from the French a few years later.

Our military operations have as their object the defeat of the enemy, and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task, I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British troops operate; but our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. Since the days of Halaka your city and your lands have been subject to the tyranny of strangers, your palaces have fallen into ruins, your gardens have sunk in desolation, and your forefathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in distant places.

Since the days of Midhat, the Turks have talked of reforms, yet do not the ruins and wastes of today testify the vanity of those promises?

It is the wish not only of my King and his peoples, but it is also the wish of the great nations with whom he is in alliance, that you should prosper even as in the past, when your lands were fertile, when your ancestors gave to the world literature, science, and art, and when Baghdad city was one of the wonders of the world.

Not long afterward, the British betrayed their promises of self-determination to those who had fought with them against the Ottomans, implementing Sykes-Picot under the fig-leaf of a League of Nations mandate set into motion at San Remo. Even before they heard the news they knew was coming, some locals had risen in revolt. The British rained down bombs and gas against these dissidents, both Kurd and Arab, a policy that continued until nominal independence a dozen years later. Major actions were taken against cities such as Fallujah and Samarra.

The policy derived not as much from the British ruling class view that the lives of inferior "wogs" were of no account but because of the need to achieve control on the cheap. Troops on the ground were expensive and suffered too many casualties. The theory of Hugh Trenchard, the head of the new Royal Air Force, backed by Secretary for War Winston Churchill, was that rebellions could be subdued far more economically by deploying air power. As Christopher Catherwood points out in Churchill's Folly: How Winston Churchill Created Modern Iraq, Britain's control over Iraq offered a chance to "carry out a far-sighted policy of Imperial aerial development in the future."

In a letter to Trenchard on Aug. 29, 1920, Churchill wrote, "I think you should certainly proceed with the experimental work on gas bombs, especially mustard gas, which would inflict punishment on recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury on them." A grotesque lie, of course, and one that would have lethal consequences for many Iraqis, particularly children and the elderly.

As Geoff Simons wrote in his 1996 book Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam:

Arthur Harris, the man who would later oversee the destruction of German cities during WW II, also saw action in Iraq and participated in the bombing of civilians as a wing commander. He wrote of this experience, "The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage. Within forty-five minutes a full-size village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured."

The technique proved effective and cost the lives of unknown thousands of Iraqis, mostly civilians. Consequently, in 1922, the British Air Ministry was given total control of security in Iraq. For the next decade, the RAF bombed and strafed town and village. And, indeed, expenses were kept down.

At the Cairo conference in 1921, Iraq's political structure was worked out, with King Faisal bin Hussain installed as monarch, and Sunni Arabs in most high government posts. The Anglo-Iraqi Treaty the following year put foreign and fiscal policy in British hands. After oil was discovered at Kirkuk in 1927, Faisal pushed for real independence. For his troubles, on October 3, 1932, Iraq got a seat in the League of Nations, but Britain kept its military bases and transit rights for its troops. Together with companies from France, the United States, the Netherlands and Turkey, who froze out Iraqi investors, Britain also kept control of the Iraq's oil.

This arrangement lasted until 1961, when the head of the military government - who had executed King Faisal II and other royals after a coup d'etat three years earlier - nationalized most of the oil industry. The rest was nationalized in '71 and remains so today despite various proposals to privatize or otherwise open it up to investors. Two September meetings in Dubai were held to go line by line through what the controversial proposed new oil law will mean for Iraq, if it is ever passed. Among the sponsors: Chevron, Conoco Phillips, Shell, General Electric, ABB, Total, Marathon Oil, BP, Norway's StatOil, Kuwait Energy, the United Arab Emirates-based Crescent Oil and Dana Gas, Raytheon, Oracle, Janussian Security Risk Management, DHL, Schlumberger, and others.

While the parliament in Baghdad remains stalemated on the oil law primarily because of objections by the Kurds, not so coincidentally new oil deals are being signed at a growing pace by the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, which, despite disclaimers, is acting ever more on its own.

The Iraq that was carved by outsiders from the remnant of one dead empire at the hands of two moribund others is now, except on paper, all but finished. As even Alan Greenspan has conceded five years late, 170,000 troops of yet another empire remain on the ground in the ancient land of the Tigris and Euphrates not to keep alive the fiction that is Iraq, but rather for what's in the ground: an estimated 112 billion barrels of oil.

The 55 months of the war and occupation by the American empire has led to more deaths of Iraqi civilians every month than Churchill and Trenchard and their successors managed to kill in 15 years of official colonialism. The puppets make occasional noises about those who yank their strings while the Iraqi people - 1 million dead, 2.2 million displaced internally, 2.5 million in exile - scream for relief. The "independence" they were supposedly granted 75 years ago stays a dream, daily life a nightmare.

I have to admit that I do this with some trepidation. I can already feel the assault on my inbox. But after a good long think about potential time and energy being lost by our entire community to senseless and ultimately inconsequential musings, I have to come out and say it: the alternative theories about 9-11 are wrong. Worse, the endless theorizing and speculation about trajectories, explosives, military tests, fake airplane parts and remote control navigation actually distracts some of our best potential activists from addressing the more substantive matters at hand.

Yes, I believe that 9-11 theorizing debilitates the counterculture. It robs us of some potentially creative thinkers. It replaces truly important questions with trivial ones. It marginalizes more constructive investigation of American participation in the development of Al Qaeda as well as its subsequent aggravation. And perhaps worst of all, it is precisely the sort of activity that government disinformation specialists would want us to be involved with.

9-11 theorists are unwittingly performing as the unpaid minions of the administration’s propaganda wing. (At least most of them are unpaid; no doubt, some of the loudest are working as contractors for the same agencies whose activities they pretend to deconstruct.) That’s why, instead of nodding along with their long-winded, preposterous yarns under the false belief that any critique is better than no critique, we—the informed, intelligent, and reasonable members of the war resistance—must instead disassociate ourselves from this drivel. In other words, we must draw the line between the kind of analysis done by Greg Palast and that done by Pilots for Truth. If we don’t apply discipline to our thinking, we risk falling into the trap that even some of our best intellectuals have—like Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, who on reading a bit too much 9-11 conspiracy, has concluded that it all has some merit.

True enough, these huge incidents have produced many unexpected details. The plane in Pennsylvania scattered its parts differently than we might have expected it to. Lamp posts near the Pentagon got knocked over when we wouldn’t have thought were vulnerable given the altitude of the approaching plane. Building number 7 fell hours later, even though it was never directly hit by a plane. Video photography of the collapses show the towers falling quite neatly, as if in a planned detonation.

But strange and unexpected details don’t necessarily point to the fallacy of the central premise—especially when the alternative involves the active coordination of thousands, if not tens of thousands of citizens in a conspiracy to attack the United States. We must look at what each intriguing detail or inconsistency actually says about how the crime took place. Again, in the words of my favorite member of the NYPD, “These explanations are principally based on the fatally flawed idea that any confusion or misinterpretation or differing accounts in times of crisis must be the product of purposeful lies. They neglect the idea that in crises, and when there is mass confusion, people do not have specific recollections, only general ones that are highly subjective, such as what direction a plane sounded like it was coming from. Their stories seek to poke holes in prevailing truth, yet offer no alternative that could be seen as remotely plausible.”

For example, the Pilots for 911 Truth website explains: “Why was Capt. Burlingame, a retired Military Officer with training in anti-terrorism, reported to have given up his airplane to 5 foot nothing. 100 and nothing Hani Hanjour holding a “boxcutter”. (Exaggeration added for size of Hani, he was tiny, lets just put it that way). We at pilotsfor911truth.org feel the same as his family in that Capt. Burlingame would not have given up his airplane unlike what is reported in this linked article from CNN.”

What, exactly, is this supposed to mean? Was Captain Burlingame murdered? Or was he the willing participant in the government’s effort to sell the invasion of Iraq to America—so much so that he chose to enter into a suicidal pact? Or was the hijacker bigger than his passport suggests? Or is it implausible that a small dark man from an undeveloped country was able to overpower a big, trained, white man from a Superpower?

And that’s where I suspect all this theorizing really takes us: to the heart of a racist jingoism worse even than the triumphalism justifying our foreign policy to begin with. They can’t bring themselves to accept that our big bad government can really be so swiftly outfoxed by a dozen relatively untrained Arab guys. And rather than go there, they’d prefer to maintain the myth of American hegemony. On a certain level, it feels better to believe that we are only vulnerable by our leaders’ sick choice—not by our adversarsies’ increasing strength and prowess.

But maintaining this comforting illusion comes at a price. It paralyzes our ability to do the real work necessary to parse what is going on. I mean, on a certain level, what does it matter whether Osama Bin Laden, a CIA-trained former ally is currently acting on his own or as an operative of some covert semi-governmental organization or corporation? We can’t even begin to ask these questions when the people who might be most qualified to look into them are instead crippled by their own ethnocentrism.

The cultivation of a critically aware public is too important right now for us to entertain this silliness any longer. When a full 40 percent of the American public believes that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9-11, we can’t afford the luxury of this delusional behavior. We are the alternative to the FoxNews version of events, and we must strive to present a more responsible alternative to Karl Rove’s disinformation.

The war profiteers are absolutely delighted that so many of us are still distracted by this phantom menace. And they delight in our belief that the central government is really powerful enough to pull something like this off. I’ve been interacting with intelligence people for the past three years, going to conferences and writing articles promoting an open-source approach to national security. After these encounters, I can assure you—anyone who knows anything about our government knows that a conspiracy on this order is well beyond their capabilities. Hell, the administration couldn’t even “find” weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They can’t even reveal a Valerie Plame or fire the few remaining honest US attorneys without a complete backfire. Conspiracy is not what these folks are good at.

Our government excels at doing its really bad stuff out in the open. They break laws in order to spy on citizens, and refuse to acknowledge objections from lawmakers or justice. They take taxpayers money and give it to the companies they run. They acknowledge the many billions of dollars that go missing, and offer not even a shrug. They put the people who formerly lobbied on behalf of industries in positions running the agencies that are supposed to be regulating them.

By looking under the rug for what isn’t even there, we neglect the horror show that is in plain view. In the process, we make it even easier for the criminals running our government to perpetuate their illegal, unethical and un-American activities.

In fact, the most logical conclusion I can draw from the existing evidence is that 9-11 theorists are themselves covert government operatives, dedicated to confusing the public, distracting activists from their tasks, equating all dissent with the lunatic fringe, and provoking the counterculture’s misplaced belief in the competency of its foes.

That’s the real conspiracy.

TIME has obtained an incident report prepared by the U.S. government describing a fire fight Sunday in Baghdad in which at least eight Iraqis were reported killed and 13 wounded. The deadly incident occurred when a convoy of U.S. personnel protected by Blackwater security contractors came under small arms fire. Blackwater returned fire, resulting in the Iraqi deaths. The loss of life has provoked anger in Baghdad, where the Interior Ministry has suspended Blackwater's license to operate around the country. Several Iraqi government officials have indicated their opposition to Blackwater's continued presence in their country. If the suspension is made permanent, it could significantly impair security for key U.S. personnel in the country, a U.S. official in Baghdad told TIME. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose State Department depends on Blackwater to protect its Iraq-based staffers, called Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to say that the U.S. has launched its own investigation into the matter.

more here

Police in the northern city of Hanover said they would not press charges after responding to calls made by residents in an apartment block who were woken by a loud crash in the early hours of Saturday.

Officers found the street and pavement covered in electronic parts and discovered who the culprit was.

Asked what had driven him to the night-time outburst, the 51-year-old man said he had simply got annoyed with his computer.

"Who hasn't felt like doing that?" said a police spokesman.

While escaping any official sanction the man was made to clear up the debris.

German police excuse angry computer user for outburst - Yahoo! News

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Christian whacko site is very sure this is a portent. Who'd a thunk it?