The Confessions of an economic hitman dude explains the US handling of Saddam from beginning to end.

The film is described by Wikipedia, IMDB and Sony and is available from archive.org, Google and youtube.

BBC article and Wikipedia article about the documentary which is freely available on archive.org as one complete DVD or as 3 parts, also available from youtube and:

• Part I: Baby It's Cold Outside YouTube
• Part II: The Phantom Victory YouTube
• Part III: The Shadows in the Cave YouTube

Guantanamo guard reunited with ex-inmates

"The news would always try to make Guantanamo into this great place," he says, "like 'they [prisoners] were treated so great'. No it wasn't. You know here I was basically just putting innocent people in cages."

"Mr. Baquet said that's not a factor. "The Times has probably acknowledged its own mistakes from that period more than anyone," he said. "We certainly haven't been shy about doing that. We're doing the stories that make sense to us and that offer our readers something worthwhile."

That is, of course, all bollocks. Keller still writes a column. The Times is playing this on the downlow precisely because it never truly has atoned for its role in a fiasco. The op-ed page still welcomes submissions from people whose work on this most grotesque foreign-policy blunder should have been as definitive a career-killer as were Joe Hazlewood's navigational abilities."

How could Britain and the US get this so wrong? A French intelligence guy states it succinctly "they have less of an immune system to misinformation". This one hour BBC report explains how the US and UK were lied to (and didn't seem to care).

Juan Cole - March 19, 2013.

The true purpose of the Iraq invasion remains opaque. Here's a theory why.