Zarqawi - a Jordanian thug who, like so many others, had been radicalized by the American-backed anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan - was a White House tool from the beginning. Before the war, his two-bit terrorist wannabe organization in the Kurdish-held Iraqi north had been targeted for destruction by U.S. Special Forces. But as the Atlantic Monthly reports, George W. Bush prevented at least three separate operations that would have eliminated the Zarqawi group - because such a strike would have interfered with that earlier psy-ops attack on the American people: the selling of the Iraq invasion on false pretenses. Although Zarqawi's gang was in U.S.-controlled territory where Saddam had no power, the Regime's war-peddlers used it to "prove" the non-existent link between Iraq and al Qaeda.

Spared by Bush, Zarqawi proved a serviceable villian after the invasion, always there to be blamed for a new terrorist spectacular whenever a spate of bad war news hit the Homeland press - despite, once again, being in the crosshairs of American forces on several occasions. On at least three occasions in the past year, Jordanian intelligence had pinpointed Zarqawi's location in Iraq and passed the intelligence to their close compadres in the American security organs; but every time, the Americans somehow "arrived too late," as the Atlantic reports.

However by this spring, with no amount of psy-ops able to halt Bush's plunge in the polls - and with the horrific sectarian civil war unleashed by Bush's aggression eclipsing all other violence - the "Zarqawi program" was obviously faltering: not enough PR bang for the buck. And so they did his quietus make - not with a bare bodkin but a thousand pounds of bombs: a little bit of "shock and awe" to goose the news cycle. Bush could have stopped him long ago; he could have spared the Iraqi people the ravages of his favored freebooter; but he chose not to.

Who can say if the beheading of Nicholas Berg - which made Zarqawi a "star" and adroitly demonized the whole Iraqi resistance at such a critical moment - was part of that "most successful information campaign to date"? One can only hope not; one can only hope that in this, as in so many other instances, the Bush Regime was just lucky. After all, who can forget that incredible stroke of good fortune on September 11, 2001 - just one year after a group led by Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Jeb Bush declared that only a "new Pearl Harbor" could "catalyze" the American people into accepting their radical militarist program of conquering Iraq, establishing bases in Central Asia, waging "pre-emptive" wars, weaponizing space, gutting nuclear treaties, and larding the war-related industries with pork beyond the dreams of avarice. As Bush himself said while the Twin Towers were still smoldering: "Through my tears, I see opportunity."

Nicholas Berg, on the other hand, was remarkably unlucky. More of an idealist than a chest-thumping corporate predator like ex-CEOs Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, Berg, 26, had developed a method for helping underdeveloped areas build safe, affordable structures where steel is hard to come by, as Wikipedia reports. Progress, not profit, was his motivating force. He was also an idealist in another way: he believed in his government. The president said Iraq had been liberated - "mission accomplished" - and that American companies needed to help the Iraqi people rebuild their land. Berg didn't realize that the president was a liar. Iraq had not been liberated but delivered into a new hell. Mass deaths, house raids, airstrikes, societal collapse and torture had spawned a fierce armed resistance. Bush's invasion had also loosed the most brutal, ignorant religious extremists - like Zarqawi - to prey upon the land. Meanwhile, "reconstruction" was a sick joke: it was just a pipeline for Bush cronies to drain Iraq, and the U.S. Treasury, bone-dry.

Berg came alone: no bodyguard of bristling mercenaries, no Halliburton subcontracts, no Beltway cronies. Work was promised, but without that insider grease, fell through. He decided to go home. Six days before his scheduled departure, he was suddenly seized by Iraqi police and turned over to U.S. forces. For reasons still unclear, he was held for 13 days - during which time the Abu Ghraib revelations ignited the land, and the tinderbox of Fallujah exploded when four mercenaries were killed in retaliation for the American shooting of Iraqi protestors a few days before.

Berg was released into this heightened turmoil one day after his family filed a lawsuit against his illegal detention; he disappeared four days later. His remains were found one month later near a Baghdad highway; the gruesome video appeared three days after that. Abu Ghraib disappeared from the front pages; it was not an issue in the presidential election that year.

Zarqawi - or "Zarqawi" - was the fake emblem of a fake war, the "war on terror" that the Bush Regime is pretending to fight while it goes about its long-planned business of exploiting "opportunities" like 9/11. Nicholas Berg was no emblem; he was just another human being literally ripped to shreds in that dark maw where high politics and low murder feast on the same lies, the same flesh.

Part II: A Dangerous Man

But despite the central role that Berg unwillingly played in the concoction of the Zarqawi legend, he was largely airbrushed from the lurid coverage of its grand finale. That's because any new story on Berg would naturally center around his most outspoken survivor, his father Michael. And Michael Berg is a man with a dangerous message, a radical subversion of every value that the Bush Administration is fighting to preserve.

In many ways, of course, it's an ancient danger, a destabilizing notion that has threatened the guardians of civilization for thousands of years. Its advocates have always been relegated to the lunatic fringe, ignored and forgotten, except in rare cases when their subversion has taken hold, usually among the lower orders. In each such case, however, down through the ages, the civilized world has, like a healthy body, acted swiftly to remove the carriers of disorder. Still, in every generation the bacillus emerges once again, and Michael Berg, no doubt weakened by his grief, has become seriously infected.

It's no wonder, then, that his media appearances last week were so brief and circumscribed. For there he was, father of a victim murdered in the most gruesome fashion imaginable by the terrorist Zarqawi (or someone just like him), a survivor fully entitled to exult in the revenging fury and violent self-righteousness that are among the chief values of the Bush Imperium - and all Berg could talk about was mercy and forgiveness, peace and restoration. He would not even take pleasure in the death of Zarqawi, whom he called a "fellow human being." Instead, he grieved for Zarqawi's family and wished that the brutal killer could have been subjected to "restorative justice" - made to work in a hospital with children maimed by war, for example - setting him on a path where his human decency might have been restored.

Nor would Berg praise the guardian of civilization, George W. Bush, for finally ending the career of the terrorist he had used so cynically to justify aggressive war. Instead, Berg blamed Bush for unleashing mass death on the people of Iraq, and instigating the cycle of violence that had consumed his son. But even for the authors of war, for the state terrorists who kill on an industrial scale, by remote control, ensconced in safety, comfort, privilege and wealth, Berg called for restoration, not revenge: they should be removed from power and compelled to some compassionate labor that might redeem their corrupted humanity.

It goes without saying that Berg's comments were instantly condemned throughout the vast engine of bile-driven groupthink known as the rightwing media. He was reviled as a traitor, a fool, a terrorist-lover, "less than human," a monster whose son will slap his face in the afterlife. He was derided for his quixotic Congressional campaign as the Green Party candidate for Delaware: what place do such weapons of the weak - mercy, forgiveness, non-violence - have in the halls of power? For the mainstream, he was just a blip, a quirky diversion in the flood of triumphant stories on Zarqawi's demise.

And to be sure, it is foolish to oppose the cherished values of our 21st century civilization: violence, bluster, ignorance and fear. It's foolish to take upon oneself the responsibility to break the cycle of violence at last, to say: "Let it end with me, if nowhere else; let it end now, no matter what the provocation; let something new, something more human, some restoration take root in this bloodstained ground."

But what if such folly is the only way for humankind to begin climbing out of the festering pit we have made of the world?

On April 7, a triple suicide bombing by men dressed as women targeted worshippers just as they were leaving the mosque, killing 90 and wounding 175.

The police were exploring the possibility that Friday's bombing could have been the work of a man dressed as a woman or as a cleric, the only way to escape security checks put up at the mosque since the April bombings.

Two people were also killed and 16 others wounded when four mortar rounds struck the Sab al-Bur neighbourhood of north Baghdad.

The killing came despite a massive clampdown in the capital ordered by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki that saw vehicles banned from the capital's streets during Friday prayer time and tens of thousands of Iraqi and US soldiers out on patrol.

The crackdown, which began Wednesday and is dubbed Operation Forward Together, is one of the largest since the US-led invasion of 2003. It is aimed at exploiting any power vacuum in insurgent ranks following the death of Al-Qaeda Iraq frontman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a US air raid last week.

The defence ministry said 160 additional checkpoints had been set up in Baghdad and 26,000 Iraqi soldiers, 23,000 Iraqi police and 7,200 coalition troops deployed on the streets.

The plan includes house-to-house searches in areas suspected of harbouring insurgents as well as a crackdown on civilians carrying weapons.

A night-time curfew in Baghdad has also been extended by two and a half hours.

Ahead of Friday's mosque bombing, the government and its US backers had already been talking up the success of the crackdown.

The US military said Thursday that it had killed 104 rebels and captured 759 in 452 operations since Zarqawi's death.

Iraqi national security advisor Muwaffaq al-Rubaie said "it was beginning of the end of Al-Qaeda in Iraq."

"We believe Al-Qaeda in Iraq was taken by surprise; they did not anticipate how powerful the Iraqi security forces are and how the government is on the attack now," he said.

Outside the capital, insurgent violence raged on Friday.

Just south of Baghdad, in an area dubbed the triangle of death for the frequency of rebel attacks, four people were killed and 10 kidnapped in separate incidents, police said.

An Iraqi army soldier was shot dead in the northern town of Hawija, while an employee of Northern Gas Company was shot dead in the oil city of Kirkuk.

In the restive city of Baquba, north of the capital, a woman and her four children were killed overnight when a bomb went off in a neighbour's house, police said.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, reported that Iraq had asked the US-led coalition to halt the transfer of detainees to its custody because of fears that its prison service had been overrun by abusive Shiite militiamen.

"We cannot control the prisons. It's as simple as that," the paper quoted Deputy Justice Minister Pusho Ibrahim Ali Daza Yei, a Kurd, as saying.

"Our jails are infiltrated by the militias from top to bottom, from Basra to Baghdad," he said, adding that there was particular concern about interior ministry-run prisons that house 1,797 inmates, 90 percent of them Sunni Arabs.

Yei said he had written to the US officer in charge of coalition-run prisons in Iraq asking him to suspend plans to transfer to Iraqi control five facilities housing more than 15,000 inmates.

Major General John D. Gardner told the daily that the transfer would not take place "until each respective facility and the Iraqi corrections system have demonstrated the ability to maintain" US standards of custody.

Separately, the US military announced it had launched a probe into the deaths of three male detainees in its custody in Salaheddin province around May 9.

And on Thursday, the US Congress approved 66 billion dollars for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Around 5pm an IED exploded on Al-Burahman Street. Afterwards, US forces blocked the area and closed the streets. When a sniper shot at troops from a location close the Khalis family home, soldiers stormed the house. Fifteen people were crammed into one room, huddled together for safety. According to witnesses, troops broke down the door to the house when as they raided it, and began "shooting everywhere".

The "Americans were yelling, 'fuck you, shut up,'" says one of the survivors, 36 year-old Shireen, whose mother, brother and sister were killed in the incident. There were mostly women and children in the room, she says.

Shireen's mentally disabled brother, 40 year-old Khalid Zaidan Khalif, put his arms around his 66 year-old father, Zaidan Khalif Habib trying to protect him. Troops shot Khalid and then pushed the father onto the floor, says Shireen.

It all happened so fast she says that, "I couldn't see anything, I just heard the shooting." Her sister, 20 year-old Emam Zaidan, was holding Shireen's 18 month-old son in her arms when the shooting began.

"After the terrible shooting was a terrible silence. I thought they killed my father. I tried to talk to my sister. She was in her last year at school, studying for her final exams. I asked her, 'is my son ok or he is dead?' She didn't respond. She was slumped against the wall. I tried to touch her shoulder and my son's clothes were filled by blood. Then I realized she was dying."

"I tried to talk to my mother, 'why are you laying down like this?' I asked her. When I tried to make her sit up I saw something white hanging from her eyes. It was one of her eyes." Sixty year-old Khairiya N'sses Jasim had also been shot, her "other eye was stuck to the wall".

Her sister didn't die immediately. Shireen says in her last moments Emam begged the soldiers in English to help her. They left, she says, and brought back a military doctor, but Emam died almost immediately.

After the three were killed, Shireen says, the troops apologised, saying
they killed the wrong people.

According to Reuters, a spokesman for the 101st Airborne Division (which controls the area) claimed that soldiers from its 3rd Brigade Combat Team had "killed two unnamed men and a woman in a house who had 'planned to attack the soldiers'".

Yet, according to Iraqi police who said they witnessed the event, the civilians were unarmed. "They were not armed and there were no gunmen in the house," said an officer from the Joint Coordination Center, which acts as liaison between Iraqi and US security forces.

In a statement of what appears to be sheer fabrication, Master Sergeant Terry Webster of the 101st Airborne told Reuters that an injured woman who was taken from the scene "confessed that the three people killed had planned to attack the soldiers as they drove by the house."

Instead, according to survivors, troops attempted to cover up their wrong doing by methods becoming disturbingly more common. Shireen says before leaving, soldiers dragged her brother out into the corridor, shot him in the chest three more times, placed a gun next to his legs to make it appear he was armed, and then took pictures.

US troops were also accused of planting an AK-47 on a disabled man they shot to death in Hamdaniyah on 26 April. It's another case of wildly differing accounts that indicate a cover-up by Marines who executed an unarmed civilian.

Marines say they found 52 year-old Hashim Ibrahim Awad al-Zobaie digging a hole to plant a bomb and killed him in a gun battle. Relatives of the dead man say he was taken from his home at 2am by Marines and that they later heard shots. Too afraid to investigate until morning, they eventually found Hashim with gunshots to his face. A next door neighbor says Marines had taken a shovel and AK-47 from his house the night before.

In another event, Iraqi police and witnesses told reporters of eleven people rounded up and killed by US troops in Ishaqi in March, most of them women and children. Though troops were cleared, according to witnesses soldiers attempted to cover up the massacre by blowing up the house afterwards.

Significantly, in both the Ishaqi and Samarra incidents, Iraqi police stepped forward to contradict US military accounts.

In response to these, and other civilian killings by US troops, even the new puppet-Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has said enough is enough. In unprecedented criticisms against the US occupation, al-Maliki said violence against civilians is a "daily phenomenon" by many US troops who "do not respect the Iraqi people".

"They crush them with their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion....There is a limit to the acceptable excuses," he stated. "Those who kill intentionally or through negligence should be tried."

He's right. And there are the laws to do such. Yet, with a US administration that thinks the Geneva Conventions are "archaic," it's not surprising that individual soldiers are committing crimes condoned at the highest levels.

Clearly, some troops are out of control and they know it. Otherwise they wouldn't be covering their tracks. But who is giving the orders that this is ok? This is where the focus of Haditha, Abu Ghraib, and all other investigations of abuse, murder, and torture ought to be. And where an inquiry into the destruction of Fallujah and the massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians should begin.

But this information contradicts another email uncovered by Judicial Watch in 2004. The email, dated March 5, 2003, sent by an official of the Army Corps of Engineers whose name was redacted, stated, "We anticipate no issue [with the Halliburton deal] since the action has been coordinated w VP's office."

"These new documents raise questions about the involvement of the Vice President's office in the controversial KBR deal," Tom Fenton, Judicial Watch President, said. "One has to wonder whether the Army was being forthright about the issue."

Judicial Watch was forced to obtain a court order to release the documents because USACE improperly claimed exemptions from the FOIA. One document USACE attempted to exempt from release includes a frank admission by an official who said, "I am copying you on this crap since I honestly believe the competitive procurement will never happen."

"It took the intervention of a federal district judge to force the Army to release the document," a Judicial Watch press release states.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is currently investigating possible criminal behavior in the way the Pentagon has awarded contracts to Halliburton. USACE demoted its highest-ranking civilian employee for blowing the whistle on improper and potentially illegal contracting practices committed by Halliburton and the Pentagon.

"Retreat is not an option in Iraq," declared House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio. "Achieving victory is our only option, for the American people and our kids."

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California countered: "Stay the course, I don't think so Mr. President. It's time to face the facts."

She called for a new direction in the conflict. "The war in Iraq has been a mistake. I say, a grotesque mistake."

Four months before midterm elections that will decide control of Congress, House Republicans sought to force Republicans and Democrats alike to take a position on the conflict that began with the U.S. invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in the spring of 2003.

Democrats denounced the debate and vote as a politically motivated charade, and several prominent Democrats joined Pelosi in saying they would vote against the measure because, they said, supporting it would affirm Bush's "failed policy" in Iraq.

Democrats denounced the debate and vote as a politically motivated sham, and several prominent Democrats joined Pelosi in saying they would vote against the measure even though Republicans could then try to claim that Democrats don't support U.S. troops.

Japanese officials had sent repeated signals that the pullout would take place in the summer as the domestically unpopular deployment would have run its course.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, the government spokesman, earlier Friday denied that Britain had set a date to leave the southern city of Samawa where the 600 Japanese troops are based.

But Foreign Minister Taro Aso later said that Japan can "decide on the timeframe of a withdrawal fairly soon."

The humanitarian mission first launched in 2003 marks the first time since World War II that Japan has sent armed forces to a country where fighting is underway.

The deployment has been widely viewed as a way for Japan to exert influence as more than an economic power.

The troops have not suffered casualties or even fired their weapons due to Japan's pacifist 1947 constitution and have relied on Australian, British and earlier on Dutch forces for protection.

The mission has aimed to rebuild the area around the southern city of Samawa. As the region is relatively peaceful, Japan calls it a "non-combat zone" in Iraq so as not to violate the constitution.