W. Va. Sen. on Iraq war: 'My Vote Was Wrong'

Better late than never. U.S. Senator regrets vote for war. Let’s use the turning tides to defeat the neocons once and for all. In Iraq alone they are directly responsible for the deaths of at least 40,000 human beings ( the figure before includes between 25-30,000 Iraqi soldiers needlessly killed in addition to civilians who are still dying) since the beginning of this unprovoked, illegal war. Stopping them in Iraq may encourage a rethinking of priorities that could bring new directions to this tortured world. Goodness knows we need them.

Bring our troops home now! End the occupation of Iraq now! This is what the majority of Iraqi’s want! They want their country back now!!! jamie

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CHARLESTON, W.Va. - U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller regrets his vote to authorize a war against Iraq

"If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it," Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Friday. "I have admitted that my vote was wrong."
The Democratic-led Senate approved the war resolution 77-23 on Oct. 11, 2002, one day after the U.S. House approved a similar resolution.
"The decision got made before there was a whole bunch of intelligence," said Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. "I think the intelligence was shaped. And I think the interpretation of the intelligence was shaped.
"We had this feeling we could be welcomed as liberators. Americans don't know history, geography, ethnicity. The administration had no idea of what they were getting into in Iraq. We are not internationalists. We border on being isolationists. We don't know anything about the Middle East."
Rockefeller also said he is disturbed at the failure to involve the United Nations (news - web sites) in creating a new government and finding peace in Iraq.
Many of the senator's feelings were strengthened last week during a weeklong trip with four other Democratic senators to Iraq and four other Middle Eastern nations.
In Iraq, the senators visited a team of researchers investigating the presence of weapons of mass destruction.
"They have three million pieces of paper," Rockefeller said. "But it is a sham. There is nothing to point to any weapons of any kind."
Rockefeller said the influence of terrorist groups, such as al-Qaida, is growing in Iraq. He estimated that only about 5 percent of insurgents in Iraq are recent arrivals, with the rest "homegrown."

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Bush Slays 'Em with WMD Gag
A Comic Bomb
By JOHN BRENEMAN
With a comic touch as deft as a Baghdad bombing raid, President Bush reduced the side-splitting Iraq weapons of mass destruction fiasco to a punchline.
The Commander-in-Cheek laughed off the world's concern about non-existent WMDs at the 60th annual Radio & Television Correspondents' Association dinner Wednesday night.
War on Iraq U.S. death toll: hundreds; Cost: untold billions; Bush's standup routine: priceless.
Too bad the families of soldiers killed in Iraq don't get the joke.
If you missed it, President Bush was showing funny pictures and cracking jokes about them when up popped a photo of him looking under a desk. "Those weapons of mass destruction must be somewhere," quipped the White House wagster. "Nope, no weapons over there Maybe under here."
The bit unwittingly lampooned Bush's cluelessness that his phony weapons bluster for a war that has now claimed hundreds of U.S. lives might not be the best fodder for cornball humor from a leader regarded in much of the world as a malevolent moron.
Sources say Bush is planning followup jokes about some of his other wacky stunts, like tagging the U.S. Constitution with anti-gay grafitti, giving phony $4 billion cost estimates for the $5.5 billion Medicare bill and sporting a flightsuit for his side-splitting "Mission Accomplished" caper.
"Sheer comic genius," raved the respected comedian Carrot Top, who is helping the president build an arsenal of one-liners and witticisms of mass destruction.

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DUBAI: Iraq is facing difficulties in exporting oil from both its northern and southern fields, the Middle East Economic Survey reports in its Monday edition.

Exports of Kirkuk crude through the Turkish port of Ceyhan will be delayed until mid-April, the industry specialists say.

"Technical problems in Kirkuk, mainly rising water cut, have delayed pumping to Ceyhan for the time being," MEES says.

Iraq auctioned six million barrels of Kirkuk crude in March (200,000 per day for the month) and was planning to have a back-to-back sale of a monthly average of 270,000 bpd in March and April, MEES notes.

And plans to export around 250,000-300,000 bpd of Basrah Light from Khor al-Amaya are also in trouble.

"The major international firms are reluctant to send their vessels to the offshore facility in the northern Gulf, despite the fact that SOMO (State Oil Marketing Organisation) has offered a 0.10 cents a barrel discount for crude loaded during March and April," says the weekly newsletter.

"SOMO is considering asking a specialized firm to survey the route and the safety of the infrastructure of the old export facility to reassure the international oil companies."

Only five vessels have loaded so far from the Khor al-Amaya facility which has been open for around a month. Exports in March have averaged only about 100,000 bpd, with the crude destined mainly for India, MEES says.

On Thursday, an explosion set ablaze a major oil well west of Kirkuk that feeds exports through Turkey.

Oil-rich Iraq has been struggling to reopen its export pipelines, which have been repeatedly attacked, particularly in the north, by insurgents fighting the continuing US-led occupation.

And on Wednesday officials said Iraq's main oil export pipeline from the southern town of Basra to the Faw pensinsula was on fire due to a “technical fault.”

- AFP

Very good pictures of the kinds of “technical faults” they are having in the occupied oil fields can be found at www.BringThemHomeNow.org

Please share this information as widely as possible. Stop the neocons. Change the world. Peace.