Documents pinpoint origin of foreign fighters

Now why would the Bush administration ignore this? OIL?

Saudi Arabia and Libya, both considered allies by the United States in its fight against terrorism, were the source of about 60 percent of the foreign fighters who came to Iraq in the past year to serve as suicide bombers or to facilitate other attacks, according to senior U.S. military officials.

The data comes largely from a trove of documents and computers discovered in September, when U.S. forces raided a tent camp in the desert near Sinjar, close to the Syrian border. The raid's target was an insurgent cell believed to be responsible for smuggling the vast majority of foreign fighters into Iraq.

The most significant discovery was a collection of biographical sketches that listed hometowns and other details for more than 700 fighters brought into Iraq since August 2006.

Hahaha. I'm listening to internets tubes online radio and they just reported this. You may mentally listen to the Twilight Zone theme song here.

Via International News Ireland.

Vital Lockerbie evidence 'was tampered with'

Very interesting if all true. I haven't seen anything about this in the US media.

The key piece of material evidence used by prosecutors to implicate Libya in the Lockerbie bombing has emerged as a probable fake.

Nearly two decades after Pan Am flight 103 exploded over Scotland on 21 December, 1988, allegations of international political intrigue and shoddy investigative work are being levelled at the British government, the FBI and the Scottish police as one of the crucial witnesses, Swiss engineer Ulrich Lumpert, has apparently confessed that he lied about the origins of a crucial 'timer' - evidence that helped tie the man convicted of the bombing to the crime.

The disaster killed 270 people when the London to New York Boeing 747 exploded in mid-air. Britain and the US blamed Libya, saying that its leader, Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, wanted revenge for the US bombing of Tripoli in 1986. At a trial in the Netherlands in 2001, former Libyan agent Abdulbaset al-Megrahi was jailed for life.

Via The Guardian.

Maltese company implicated in arms trafficking to Iraqi insurgents

I've posted a couple times about the fact that finding explosives or other munitions in Iraq which have Iranian markings doesn't necessarily mean the Iranian government is supplying the insurgents. And this is exactly why.

Italian authorities yesterday announced they had interrupted an international arms trafficking deal that was to have operated between China, Malta, Italy and Libya, and which planned to supply hundreds of thousands of weapons to Iraqi insurgents, international media reported yesterday. The operation was to have seen an unnamed Maltese company acting as a middleman between Chinese weapons producers and Libyan buyers, who would, in turn, move the weapons on to Iraqi insurgents, according to coded emails recovered by Italian agents.

Now for a question. Had this transaction been successful, would Bush feel compelled to accuse the Chinese government of supplying weapons to the insurgents? Just asking.

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