A brilliant documentary by John Pilger an investigative journalist that has produced some of the most popular documentaries ever created. This particular documentary is interesting not least of all because it shows just how massively people have been unaware of what had been going on in Iraq before the coalition of the willing decided to implement regime change in another country.

Abel Bult-Ito: Nothing depleted about 'depleted uranium'
Gerry Georgatos: Victims of war - Iraqi children and families - Depleted uranium and trauma

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday he hopes have a bill to address gun violence on the Senate floor soon after the Easter break, but confirmed that measure will not include the assault weapons ban. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told reporters Tuesday she is disappointed that her assault weapons ban will not be part of a larger bill, but acknowledged it will likely make it easier to pass gun-related legislation through the Senate. Feinstein said Reid told her Monday afternoon that the ban on certain types of military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines would not be part of package of bills that would make up the Senate legislation. Reid, D-Nev., said Feinstein's measure simply did not have the support necessary to clear the floor and could not pass the 60 vote threshold needed in order to be considered by the full Senate.

CBS News: Dems shelving assault weapons ban for now

President Barack Obama rebuffed senators from his own party Tuesday when they sought greater transparency on drone strikes, arguing that the executive branch has the right to keep such information secret from lawmakers, sources said. The assertion by Obama, more typical of his recent predecessors in the White House who wanted to withhold information, came in response to questions from Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Pat Leahy (D-Vt.).

Reuters reported last week that it had viewed a document from the US Treasury Department detailing plans to provide military intelligence agencies with unfettered access to financial records of US citizens. Under the new plan, there will be no need to request access to such records on a case-by-case basis. The document, dated March 4, calls for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to oversee the linking of the Treasury’s database on suspicious customer activity, known as the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), with a computer network for US law enforcement and military agencies called the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System. [...] The preparations for a police dictatorship in the United States are well advanced and include the drawing up of lists of citizens and residents to be detained, or worse.

Despite the prisoners' hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay being acknowledged by the US military, there has so far been little reaction from the international humanitarian organizations to the action, which enters its 42nd day on Tuesday. The United Nations has yet to acknowledge or comment upon the Gitmo hunger strike. RT has reached out to UN human rights bodies in Geneva and officials have promised to respond to the inquiry with a comment by Tuesday afternoon. The only international organization to respond to what’s going on in Guantanamo is the Red Cross, which visited the island prison from February 18 to 23. It acknowledged that a hunger strike was really taking place, but so far all the organization has done is release a statement saying that “The ICRC believes past and current tensions at Guantanamo to be the direct result of the uncertainty faced by detainees.”

Yahoo: US says hunger strike grows to 21 at Guantanamo
AWIP: Guantanamo hunger strike enters day 41

An al-Qaeda group linked to Saudi Arabia’s intelligence services has dispatched 600 of its members to the southern Iraqi city of Basra to carry out terrorist attacks, Press TV reports. - The terrorists have been given orders to blow up oil pipelines, launch attacks on oil refineries, and incite ethnic violence in the city, according to the report. The report also said that some of the terrorists had fake identification cards allegedly issued by Al-Salam University of Medina, Saudi Arabia. The men reportedly received their training in the Syria-Iraq border region and are planning to attack religious sites in the Iraqi cities of Samarra, Baghdad, Karbala, and Najaf.

The full length version of 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic reveals how retired US colonel James Steele, a veteran of American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, played a key role in training and overseeing US-funded special police commandos who ran a network of torture centres in Iraq.

The Guardian: Revealed: Pentagon's link to Iraqi torture centres - General David Petraeus and 'dirty wars' veteran behind commando units implicated in detainee abuse. - The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war. Colonel James Steele was a 58-year-old retired special forces veteran when he was nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency, an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic shows. After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the special police commando (SPC) membership was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups such as the Badr brigades. A second special adviser, retired Colonel James H Coffman, worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of US funding. Coffman reported directly to General David Petraeus, sent to Iraq in June 2004 to organise and train the new Iraqi security forces. Steele, who was in Iraq from 2003 to 2005, and returned to the country in 2006, reported directly to Rumsfeld. The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses in the Guardian/BBC documentary, implicate US advisers for the first time in the human rights abuses committed by the commandos. It is also the first time that Petraeus – who last November was forced to resign as director of the CIA after a sex scandal – has been linked through an adviser to this abuse.

Kelley B. Vlahos: Trained Killers, from the Americas to Afghanistan

The Bush administration’s primary justification for launching the Iraq War is thought, probably correctly, to be an alleged WMD program that did not exist. The coterie of delusional neoconservatives surrounding Bush and Cheney contributed to a systematic process of cherry-picking dubious intelligence and outright manipulation of evidence in order to satisfy a political decision that had already been made to change the regime in Iraq through a war of aggression. The historical record pretty clearly demonstrates the distortions the administration employed to make the case that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. Inspectors who said they didn’t exist were ignored, false stories about aluminum tubes and yellowcake from Africa were peddled assertively, Iraqi defectors that were known liars were used as anonymous sources alleging Saddam’s WMD development, etc. The plan eventually worked. The administration’s expressed certainty was persuasive to Americans.

Glen Rangwala & Raymond Whitacker: Twenty Lies About the Iraq War

Israel Shahak/Oded Yinon, "The Zionist Plan for the Middle East" - 23 - Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi'ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north. It is possible that the present Iranian-Iraqi confrontation will deepen this polarization.

By imposing a tax on bank deposits in exchange for a €10bn bailout package, the eurozone leaders have, at best, set “a dangerous precedent”, and, at worst dabbled in “blackmail,” writes the European press. - The agreement reached on March 16 between Cyprus, the Eurogroup and the IMF forecasts a 6.6 per cent tax on deposits of less than €100,000 and 9.9 per cent on those above that threshold. Blasted as “arbitrary,” an “expropriation” and even “hazardous”, the measure endangers the solidarity among the eurozone countries and even the free movement of capital within the EU, commentators point out. Under the headline, “Europe botches another rescue,” the Financial Times slams the unexpected bank deposit tax, adding that “just as the eurozone had begun to set the right course in its struggle with an ever-mutating debt crisis, it relapsed into its old vice”.

Reuters: Cyprus lawmakers reject bank tax; bailout in disarray
New York Times: Cyprus Rejects Bank Deposit Tax, Scuttling Bailout Deal
Cyprus Mail: Cyprus Declares “Bank Holidays” Until Thursday
Russia Today: Bailout or bankrupt: Cypriots (and Russians) hold their breath
PresseEurop: A rescue plan that will kill us
Mike Adams: It's not a 'haircut' - it's THEFT when governments loot your private bank accounts

Zero Hedge: The Rape Of Cyprus By The European Union & The IMF - A bank account is not a bond or a stock or any sort of investment. This seems to be lost on many people. A bank account is the private property of a citizen or a corporation and does not belong to the government or at least that was the supposition up until now in Europe. Let's be quite clear; the European Union has confiscated the private property of the citizens in Cyprus without debate, legislation or Parliamentary agreement.

Mike Adams: Cyprus government raids private checking and savings accounts as citizens panic - The day is coming when the U.S. government will claim it "owns" a portion of all our bank accounts, and it will electronically drain our accounts of money in a grand theft scheme designed to pay off the banksters while decimating private savings. Don't believe it? That day has already arrived in the European nation of Cyprus, where the government made a secret deal with the IMF to loot private bank accounts of up to 10% of current deposits. Banks went along with the theft, sealing off the funds from account holders. The government now plans to initiate millions of funds transfers as early as Tuesday, draining private accounts of the money the government now claims it owns.

PROVINCES,(SANA)- Terrorists on Tuesday launched a rocket containing chemical materials on Khan Al-Asal in Aleppo Countryside. Initial information shows that about 15 citizens were killed, and others were injured. - The Armed Forces carried out several operations against the armed terrorist groups in Homs countryside, inflicting heavy losses upon them. A military source told SANA reporter that the army targeted [their] hideouts in the areas of al-Rastan, Talbeiseh, al-Ghanto, Bait Rabe'a, al-Amryeh, al-Bouida al-Sharqyeh, al-Masoudyeh and al-Hamydyeh, killing scores of [them] and destroying their vehicles, some of which equipped with machineguns, in addition to destroying motorcycles used to transport terrorists.

PressTV: Syria condemns militants' use of WMD
Tony Cartalucci: NATO Proxies Using WMD's in Syria - Dozens Dead
Stephen J. Sniegoski: The Yinon Thesis Vindicated: Neocons, Israel, and the Fragmentation of Syria

Israel Shahak/Oded Yinon, "The Zionist Plan for the Middle East" - 22 - Lebanon's total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precendent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unqiue areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel's primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi'ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan. This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today.