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Iraqis talk about the horrors they experienced in Tal Afar and Mosul, where a rights group says "extrajudicial executions" of Sunni detainees occurred.

Remember how the Iraqi government and and neocons in and outside the US made a big deal of ISIL (ISIS) executing Shia officers and soldiers they caught.

It turns out part of the reason may have been that Shia officers and soldiers did mass executions of Sunni prisoners of which Maliki had plenty locked up for years.

Yet, Dick Cheney and others tried to use thexecutions of captured Shia to show ISIL as some overwhelmingly evil malignancy that required re-invasion and years more of war.

Um no, it was just blowback.

Crammed into a prison cell with 36 other people, the man debated his fate as he listened to the shelling.

Outside, fighters with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria fired mortars at the anti-terrorism detention facility in Tal Afar, where fierce battles raged between the al Qaeda splinter group and Iraqi security forces.

With the facility close to being overrun by ISIS fighters, the prison guards did the unthinkable.

"At about 2 a.m., three of the guards came into our cell ... and they opened fire with a machine gun," the man said in a video obtained by CNN. The man said he was picked up on the streets of Tal Afar eight months earlier by security forces and held without charges.

The account mirrors allegations put forward by Amnesty International, which released a report Friday saying it has evidence pointing to a pattern of "extrajudicial executions" of Sunni detainees by government forces and Shiite militias in Tal Afar, Mosul and Baquba, cities where Iraqi forces were either routed or have been locked in fierce battles with ISIS fighters and allied Sunni militants.

You can read the entire report at CNN by clinking on link embedded in title above.

schpeider

irrationalliberal1

liberal-focus

Your gun rights do not supersede my human rights

The Supreme Court partially upheld and partially rejected a set of early EPA greenhouse gas regulations for industrial pollution sources Monday, in a largely symbolic case that as expected left the agency's powers over carbon pollution almost entirely intact. The 5-4 ruling, which followed a challenge to the rules from the utility industry, does not affect the much more sweeping regulation the agency issued June 2 requiring cuts in carbon emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants.

...

The case decided Monday — Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA — questioned whether EPA’s earlier decisions to consider greenhouse gases as pollutants under the Clean Air Act and to regulate vehicles’ carbon emissions automatically triggered requirements to regulate greenhouse gases under other air programs. EPA argued that it must include carbon dioxide in a pre-construction permitting program known as “PSD” and another air permitting program known as Title V.

The court said EPA cannot require PSD or air permits based solely on an agency’s release of greenhouse gases, but that emission sources that already need those permits should have to use the best available technology to control greenhouse gases. That should affect only a small percentage of EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases, Justice Antonin Scalia said while reading his decision from the bench.

Read more at link embedded in title above. Report was partially created by Politico's best, courts blogger Josh Gerstein.

ANBAR Iraq (Reuters) - Iran's supreme leader accused the United States on Sunday of trying to retake control of Iraq by exploiting sectarian rivalries, as Sunni insurgents drove

He's mistaking Obama for Bushco, but that's fine with me.

You take care of your man al-Maliki's crumbling presidency, Iran.

We don't want any part of it.

fullpraxisnow

"We gave Iraq the chance to have an inclusive democracy."

— Barack Obama

If by democracy Obama means an estimated 1 million Iraqis killed, 4.5 million displaced, 1-2 million widows, and 5 million orphans, as Global Research reported in ‘09:

We are now able to estimate the number of Iraqis who have died in the war instigated by the Bush administration. Looking at the empirical evidence of Bush’s war legacy will put his claims of victory in perspective. Of course, even by his standards — “stability” — the jury is out. Most independent analysts would say it’s too soon to judge the political outcome. Nearly six years after the invasion, the country remains riven by sectarian politics and major unresolved issues, like the status of Kirkuk.

We have a better grasp of the human costs of the war. For example, the United Nations estimates that there are about 4.5 million displaced Iraqis — more than half of them refugees — or about one in every six citizens. Only 5 percent have chosen to return to their homes over the past year, a period of reduced violence from the high levels of 2005-07. The availability of healthcare, clean water, functioning schools, jobs and so forth remains elusive. According to Unicef, many provinces report that less than 40 percent of households have access to clean water. More than 40 percent of children in Basra, and more than 70 percent in Baghdad, cannot attend school.

The mortality caused by the war is also high. Several household surveys were conducted between 2004 and 2007. While there are differences among them, the range suggests a congruence of estimates. But none have been conducted for eighteen months, and the two most reliable surveys were completed in mid-2006. The higher of those found 650,000 “excess deaths” (mortality attributable to war); the other yielded 400,000. The war remained ferocious for twelve to fifteen months after those surveys were finished and then began to subside. Iraq Body Count, a London NGO that uses English-language press reports from Iraq to count civilian deaths, provides a means to update the 2006 estimates. While it is known to be an undercount, because press reports are incomplete and Baghdad-centric, IBC nonetheless provides useful trends, which are striking. Its estimates are nearing 100,000, more than double its June 2006 figure of 45,000. (It does not count nonviolent excess deaths — from health emergencies, for example — or insurgent deaths.) If this is an acceptable marker, a plausible estimate of total deaths can be calculated by doubling the totals of the 2006 household surveys, which used a much more reliable and sophisticated method for estimates that draws on long experience in epidemiology. So we have, at present, between 800,000 and 1.3 million “excess deaths” as we approach the six-year anniversary of this war.

This gruesome figure makes sense when reading of claims by Iraqi officials that there are 1-2 million war widows and 5 million orphans. This constitutes direct empirical evidence of total excess mortality and indirect, though confirming, evidence of the displaced and the bereaved and of general insecurity. The overall figures are stunning: 4.5 million displaced, 1-2 million widows, 5 million orphans, about 1 million dead — in one way or another, affecting nearly one in two Iraqis.

By any sensible measure, it would be difficult to describe this as a victory of any kind. It speaks volumes about the repair work we must do for Iraqis, and it should caution us against the savage wars we are prone to. Now that Bush is gone, perhaps the United States can honestly face the damage we have wrought and the responsibilities we must accept from it.

Then maybe he is conflating the word with something more like genocide.

liberal-focus

After Obama took office he wound down US involvement and left, maybe not delightedly, maybe because they wouldn't give a status of forces agreement, but we left.

The deaths from the Iraq War are not his fault, but of the Bush/Cheney jihad touched off in 2003, which was about their oil buddies, and the military industrial complex which tends to fund Republican candidates more heavily than Democrat ones, especially after two different Bush administrations (and Reagan's Afghan insurgent program) allowed them to make so much money in new warmongering.

Granted Clinton's actions in portions of Serbia, may have added to bomb and one fighter plane replacement, but weren't anything like the motherlode that the GOP has dropped on them in the past 3 decades.

When the Bush White House lost 22 million emails, Darrell Issa didn't blame the President. He blamed IBM.

So, when it's Republicans' problem, it was unavoidable and understandable, but when it happens to a Obama's IRS chief Lois Lerner, it's Watergate.

What else would you expect from an arsonist, business scammer, and car thief that the GOP protects in a position of privilege and power?

More from report:

The revelation that the Internal Revenue Service lost two years of Lois Lerner's emails has Republicans and their right-wing echo chamber dredging up Watergate comparisons. Peggy Noonan, James Poulos and Paul Mirengoff are just some of the conservatives "paging Rosemary Woods" and gleefully making comparisons to Richard Nixon's 18 minutes of erased tape.

But the GOP's flying monkeys hoping to put the former IRS official at the center of a massive Obama administration plot to target right-wing "social welfare" organizations need not go back in time to 1973 to decry the lost data. After all, in 2008 current House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa explained how the Bush White House conveniently lost 22 million emails during the Plamegate investigation that led to the conviction of Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby.

As you'll recall, millions of Bush White House emails conveniently went missing between 2003 and 2005, including those in the critical days during which the administration formulated its response to Ambassador Joe Wilson and his covert CIA operative wife, Valerie Plame. In July 2007, Darrell Issa accused Plame of perjury. Then, in February 2008, Issa turned IT expert and brushed off the email imbroglio as merely a software problem.

justinspoliticalcorner

The drumbeat of news about gun violence in the United States is so steady and rhythmic these days that it’s starting to fade into the background. Another week, another school shooting. One of the biggest risks now is of a population-wide numbness, eroding the will to tackle the crisis. So perhaps we should be grimly grateful whenever the gun lobby demonstrates that it retains the power to horrify.

Case in point: this sequence of tweets by the conservative journalist Charles C Johnson, featured on Glenn Beck’s website The Blaze and on Hot Air, and being forwarded enthusiastically everywhere among pro-gun tweeters and bloggers. (I found it via Quinn Norton.)

Johnson takes it upon himself to debunk the claim, made by the gun reform group Everytown for Gun Safety, backed by Michael Bloomberg, that there have been 74 school shootings since Adam Lanza killed 20 children, six adults and himself at Sandy Hook elementary School 18 months ago. In fact, Johnson concludes, there have only been seven. How does he manage this feat of mathematical magic? Simple: by narrowing the definition of “school shooting” so far that almost none of them count.

Let’s be fastidiously fair to Johnson and his supporters by acknowledging that a handful of the incidents he identifies do seem misclassified. Most people, for example, would surely agree that a shooting that doesn’t happen on a school campus isn’t a school shooting. But the rest of his alleged debunkings offer a truly depressing glimpse of how pro-gun argumentation works these days.

It doesn’t count, for example, if you’re a student shot at school by a gunman who wasn’t originally planning to shoot up a school that day:

Another fake shooting listed by everytown. A gunman ran onto campus, was chased by police, shot student accidentally. http://t.co/Q5M4iS3hhF