358 Does Turkey's realignment reinstate Huntington's Clash of Civilizations?

Does Turkey's realignment reinstate Huntington's Clash of Civilizations?

Turkey's embrace of Iran and cooling towards Israel are touted as evidence for the validity of Huntington's Clash of Civilizations (item 4).

But Turkey's switch was instigated by Israeli and US promotion of a defacto Kurdish state within Iraq; and moreover one oriented to Israel.

Contrary to Huntington, there is no sign of China siding with Islamic radicals. It has too much trouble with Uighur separatists in Xinjiang for such a scenario to be credible.

(1) Assange & Wikileaks
(2) Wikileaks Defence by Israel Shamir
(3) Wikipedia 'first-port-of-call'  but unreliable on Zionism; WikiSpooks alternative
(4) Does Turkey's realignment reinstate Huntington's Clash of Civilizations?
(5) Infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in Fallujah 'worse than Hiroshima'
(6) Fallujah children's 'genetic damage'

(1) Assange & Wikileaks

From: hollyavila@aol.com Date: 21.08.2010 07:23 AM

The problem with Assange is that he does not question the official story of 9 11. That makes him suspect in general.

(2) Wikileaks Defence by Israel Shamir
From: Israel Shamir <adam@israelshamir.net> To: Peter Myers2 <Peter.Myers@mailstar.net>, Zahir Ebrahim <project.humanbeingsfirst@gmail.com>, Sunil Sharma/Dissident Voice <dissidentvoice@earthlink.net>
Date: 21.08.2010 12:36 AM
Subject: Wikileaks Defence by Israel Shamir

Wikileaks: The Real Stuff

By Israel Shamir

After the tremendous coup of Wikileaks, this semi-clandestine site and organisation, which had recently brought to public knowledge so many government crimes through so many hundreds of thousands of documents (with even more of the way), has predictably come under attack. Not only from Pentagon hacks, but also from various bodies we would expect to back them rather than knife them in the back.

Reporters Without Borders accused Wikileaks of being irresponsible, for having published the names of US agents in Afghanistan. This accusation reveals the true nature of these Reporters. They do not care about freedom of the press, they care about protecting American interests and American spies. Whoever is old enough to remember the revelations of Philip Agee will recognise the pattern: All of a sudden these guys, who normally do not mind murdering others, recognise their own mortality and vulnerability. This is very good. Spies and agents should be outed: it will cause them to behave responsibly.

So much for the pro-establishment line. What a pity that some of our friends in the blogosphere joined in the chorus of detractors. Theirs are familiar and respected names of the free web: F. William Engdahl, Gordon Duff, Zahir Ebrahim. They are not to be accused of collaboration with Pentagon and the CIA.

Psychologically, one understands them. Could it be that all of a sudden we got such a windfall? Is it not a bit like those emails from Nigeria offering us millions for the simple information about our bank account? A diffident man is likely to get cold feet when a beautiful girl smiles back and proposes having a drink in a pub. The Wikileaks-deniers created an elaborate conspiracy theory: these hundreds of thousands of real documents were fabricated by the CIA and offered to an innocent public.

This conspiracy argument cuts both ways: Way one, we are asked to believe that the CIA went to unbelievable expense and bother of dumping so many secret papers, including lists of their own agents, including the revelation that US nuclear-bearing bombers were up on their way to Russia on 9/11, and what not – for quite negligible gains.

The second way is much more plausible and economical: what could be easier and cheaper way to minimise damage than to claim that the stuff is fake? In his spirited defence of Wikileaks John Pilger says: “A Pentagon document states bluntly that US intelligence intends to 'fatally marginalise' Wikileaks. The preferred tactic is smear, with corporate journalists ever ready to play their part.” Alas, not only corporate journalists, but even freelancers are doing it. There is no better way to marginalize and smear than to insist that the files in question are “chickenfeed” provided by CIA or Mossad.

I know, respect and like some deniers of Wikileaks’ feats. I do not think that they are inspired by the CIA in an attempt to minimise damage, but I do think that they are committing a great error of judgment.

Let us check the deniers’ arguments. William Engdahl writes: “far from an honest leak, it is a calculated disinformation to the gain of the US and perhaps Israeli and Indian intelligence and a coverup of the US and Western role in drug trafficking out of Afghanistan.” What is his reasoning? It is 9/11. Engdahl is a true believer in 9/11 conspiracy, and the simple fact that the editor of Wikileaks Julian Assange does not subscribe to it fully and squarely is enough to dismiss him as a stooge.

His other arguments are derivatives of this position. In the documents published by Wikileaks, there are ten references to the former head of the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, General (Ret) Hamid Gul; and this General Gul, according to the documents, has dealings with the Afghan Taliban. This is just a way to demonise Pakistan, says Engdahl, because Gul was critical of the official 9/11 version and claimed the attack was done by the Israeli Mossad.

In other documents it is said that Osama bin Laden is alive and kicking. This also annoys Engdahl: no lesser person than Benazir Bhutto proclaimed Osama dead.

There is a small ad hominem: Engdahl does not know Assange from Adam, and that is why he is “mysterious” (and other sinister adjectives). Assange did not express his belief in Engdahl’s favourite theory of 9/11, and that makes him non-kosher.

Engdahl (and other detractors) do not understand the way these documents emerged in the first place. The sheer volume of the leak is enormous. We of the independent web media have no resources to analyse them. This work was carried out by the New York Times and two European newspapers of record. These three papers tried to get some jewels out of this sea of raw data. Naturally, if somewhat regrettably, they fished out what was palatable for them and their readers and managers.

The New York Times found the leaks which fit its official mainstream attitude. The Guardian found quite different documents, altogether more interesting. If Global Research were to go after raw data, perhaps they would be able to find something even more exciting.

So Engdahl could say correctly: in the documents chosen and presented by the NY Times there are such and such tendencies. That would be a fair presentation.

Other arguments of Engdahl could be valid if Assange were an author of the leaked documents. However, the authors were US officials. They wrote these papers in their official capacity for other officials. It would not be even plausible that they would wink and write “we know who really did 9/11, ha-ha-ha.” They would lose their jobs the next day, if not the next hour!

It makes sense that some US officials want to continue to draw money from Obama's search. It is a small industry by now, which feeds a lot of contractors. For this reason, it is in their interest to claim they know he is around, disregarding the point whether he is alive or dead.

General Gul is not my cup of tea. He is a manipulative beast that made Afghanistan bleed. He is the guy who trapped the Soviets in the Brzezinski-designed quagmire at a huge cost for Afghans, Russians and Pakistanis. Thousands of Afghanis and Russians died because of him. All the troubles of Pakistan are direct consequences of ISI aiding and abetting the US and Saudi Arabia in their fight against the Russians and against the Afghani progressive forces, socialists and communists. Gul was godfather to the real Osama bin Laden and his mujahideen. He had a very good, even the best and most personal reason to point to any alternative culprit – to Mossad or to little green men, anybody at all, but not to his disciple Osama.

It is plausible that he plays ball with some men in Afghanistan: ISI armed and trained them even in 1980. It is hardly possible to demonise him: he is as bad as any head of any secret service from Gestapo to the CIA, and they are all evil guys, in my book.

However, this is all beside the point. Some US officials could have a jaundiced view of the old general meeting armed Afghanis, and any NY Times researchers were bound to find their documentation of this by simple search. In short, the bias – if any – is that of the NY Times, not of Wikileaks.

As for Engdahl’s ad hominem: Julian Assange is neither a writer nor an activist; he could not have been known previously. He is against the US war in Afghanistan and Pakistan; he’s got a huge catch, he wanted to deliver it to the people, and there was no alternative to mainstream media. We may be able to read a hundred documents, but we can’t even glimpse thousands, let alone hundreds of thousands. So his choice was judicious.

A second denier, young Pakistani intellectual cum American Ivy League graduate Zahir Ebrahim, writes: “The core-lies retained in the Wikileaks' disclosure is to once again reaffirm that there is a real nemesis called “Osama Bin Laden”, that the “war on terror” is real, that it is being inflicted upon the West from the Pakistan-Iran nexus, in order to re-substantiate the handoff of former President George W. Bush's clairvoyance to the Obama Administration that “If another September 11 style attack is being planned, it probably is being plotted in Pakistan, and not Afghanistan”!

Zahir makes the same mistake. The files are the reports of what US officials believe or claim to believe. I’d ask Zahir: if you were to get hold of all reports sent from and to Afghanistan, would you censor them to remove ideas and names that are not to your liking? Remember, these are not files from God Almighty, this is the kind of stuff that spooks and soldiers write, and it naturally reflects their view of the world. So it is not “core-lies”, but “core-truth”: US officials express under the stamp of “top secret” the very same views they openly espouse.

Gordon Duff is the least temperate of all. He writes: “The [Mossad’s] game today is using Wikileaks, given its 15 minutes of fame for trashing the US in Iraq with the helicopter video, to spread imaginary stories about Pakistan, the enemy of India and the only nuclear power in the Middle East capable of standing up to Israel… Israel would have been cited for laundering drug money for the Taliban. It is in the documents. I didn’t release them. That is illegal. Nothing involving drug flights being serviced by Israeli companies was released. It was in the files. If we really want to leak things, they are out there. It can get bloody. Wikileaks is simply another ploy by the ultra powerful Israel lobby, a cheap game meant to humiliate the United States, destroy Pakistan and build a reputation for a puppet.”

It is sectarian logic, like that of Engdahl, though of a different sect. Sectarians insist on the centrality of their thesis and they hate everybody who does not sign for it on the dotted line. We have so many sects, some quite big: the 9/11 sect of the “truthers”, the Mossad-under-every-bed sect, the Holocaust revisionist sect… They have some good arguments, but they are too intolerant. As for me, I am ready to listen to their arguments, even to support their right to express their views, but I am not ready to subscribe to them. Nor would it even be possible: these sects are divided into many subsects all in disagreement with each other.

The sectarian mindset is too venomous, too restricted. Why can’t we have a chance to express our views freely without being forced to conform to a dogma? We witnessed a sectarian attack on Chomsky: why doesn't this important intellectual subscribe to the sectarians’ beliefs? Now it is an attack against Assange: why does he not produce documents demonstrating Mossad involvement and 9/11 conspiracy? The answer is simple: probably because he has not got such documents.

If Duff, a neophyte anti-Zionist, has access to such documents as he claims, let him publish them or shut up. These insinuations “we could, we know, it will be bloody” are just empty words. His claim that “Pakistan is the only nuclear power in the Middle East capable of standing up to Israel” shows that he is rather detached from reality. Pakistan is not in the Middle East by any definition, and has invested zero effort in the Palestine conflict. Pakistan has never tried to stand up to Israel, has never assisted the Palestinian cause, and its nuclear capabilities are quite limited. Moreover, Pakistan is a loyal client of the US with a lot of problems, some of which are of its own making.

In order to understand Wikileaks and its success one should comprehend the way it works. This is not a body of dedicated political activists. Though generally sympathetic to our enlightened views, Wikileaks is an organisation of hackers, and some of them hack just for the heck of it. We are beneficiaries of their work, but they do not work for us. Let us be thankful for what they do, and avoid assisting Pentagon in marginalising them.

(3) Wikipedia 'first-port-of-call'  but unreliable on Zionism; WikiSpooks alternative
From: Nimrod <nimrod@w3z.co.uk> Date: 21.08.2010 02:31 AM

Introduction

Part of the rationale for the WikiSpooks site concerns the impossibility of Wikipedia providing effective coverage of deep political issues which have the potential to seriously jeapardise key 'official narratives'. To expect balanced coverage on such matters is akin to expecting the encyclopedias of the day to have provided rigorous coverage of Gallileo's evidence on 'Heliocentism' when to do so was to invite excommunication or worse by the Catholic Church power structure of the day. In similar fashion, and in company with the rest of the Mainstream Media, stable articles on Wikipedia largely reflect the consensus view of 'experts' whose continued rank, position and place as 'experts' among their peers and society at large, is dependent upon them keeping criticism and questioning of 'the official narrative' within clearly understood (if unwritten) bounds. Coverage outside such bounds is permissible, but only if relegated to the category of 'conspiracy theory', an inane and ! meaningless pejorative but one which has a life of its own. Its sole purpose is to pigeon-hole anything and anyone anointed with it to the equivalent of a lunatic asylum and thus better kept both out of sight and out of mind.

Zionist Shenanigans

There are sub-sets of this global self-censoring mechanism which may manifest when a well organised group of Wikipedia monitors, authors and editors set out to influence content in pursuit of an agenda. In its third month of operation, WikiSpooks has stumbled upon a fascinating example of just such a sub-set in action. The evidence is of a group of Wikipedia editors rapidly coalescing around a carefully researched and properly referenced article, and using all the tools available to experienced senior Wikipedia people to remove and/or dramatically reduce coverage of events seen as damaging to Zionist Israel

For full information see:
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Wikipedia%27s_Hasbara

And related pages at:
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Israeli_art_scam.

And:
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/2001_Israeli_Nerve_Gas_Attacks

The related articles were provided by their original Wikipedia author. "The Israeli Art Scam" article is preceded by referenced details of its Wikipedia history.

Wikispooks does not have a view on the significance of the 'Art Scam'  article beyond posing the question: "Would such blatant airbrushing of  Israeli involvement really be warranted if the intent was merely to cover-up  a relatively trivial financial scam?"

The lessons:

 * If you want to know the truth about deep political issues - don't rely on Wikipedia.
 * If you want to know the truth about Zionist Israel - don't expect to find it at Wikipedia.
 * For pretty much anything else, Wikipedia probably IS your best option as a 'first-port-of-call' introduction to a subject.

Information for editors:

WikiSpooks is a collaborative project aimed at building a comprehensive  reference source of deep political structures and events, together with the  people and organisations connected to them. In company with 'Wikipedia' and  other wiki-based projects, knowledgeable involvement with the site is  invited.

WikiSpooks enforces an editorial policy designed to compensate for the  blind-spots of Wikipedia and other mainstream media. Principle tenets of the  policy are:

 * The veracity and accuracy of official announcements, documents, press  releases etc should be treated as inversely proportional to the power,  wealth, statutory - or other claimed - authority of their source.
 * Any such information should be assumed to be in furtherance of a  hidden - if more or less obvious - agenda and thus designed to mislead  rather than to inform.
 * Reputation, Position, Rank, Place etc., in Establishment hierarchies  and protocols should be treated as pretentious conceits serving  Establishment agendas (hidden or otherwise) and thus deserving of ridicule,  satire and other forms of literary attack.

WikiSpooks also provides a secure anonymous file upload facility for  whistleblowers wishing to put information into the public domain without  revealing their identity.

The Wikispooks site is hosted in the Irish Republic.

(4) Does Turkey's realignment reinstate Huntington's Clash of Civilizations?

From: ReporterNotebook <RePorterNoteBook@Gmail.com> Date: 20.08.2010 02:43 PM

 AUGUST 18, 2010 - Wall Street Journal

How to Win the Clash of Civilizations

The key advantage of Huntington's famous model is that it describes the world as it is—not as we wish it to be.

By AYAAN HIRSI ALI

http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748703426004575338471355710184.html

What do the controversies around the proposed mosque near Ground Zero, the eviction of American missionaries from Morocco earlier this year, the minaret ban in Switzerland last year, and the recent burka ban in France have in common? All four are framed in the Western media as issues of religious tolerance. But that is not their essence. Fundamentally, they are all symptoms of what the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington called the "Clash of Civilizations," particularly the clash between Islam and the West.

Huntington's argument is worth summarizing briefly for those who now only remember his striking title. The essential building block of the post-Cold War world, he wrote, are seven or eight historical civilizations of which the Western, the Muslim and the Confucian are the most important.

The balance of power among these civilizations, he argued, is shifting. The West is declining in relative power, Islam is exploding demographically, and Asian civilizations—especially China—are economically ascendant. Huntington also said that a civilization-based world order is emerging in which states that share cultural affinities will cooperate with each other and group themselves around the leading states of their civilization.

The West's universalist pretensions are increasingly bringing it into conflict with the other civilizations, most seriously with Islam and China. Thus the survival of the West depends on Americans, Europeans and other Westerners reaffirming their shared civilization as unique—and uniting to defend it against challenges from non-Western civilizations.

Huntington's model, especially after the fall of Communism, was not popular. The fashionable idea was put forward in Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay "The End of History," in which he wrote that all states would converge on a single institutional standard of liberal capitalist democracy and never go to war with each other. The equivalent neoconservative rosy scenario was a "unipolar" world of unrivalled American hegemony. Either way, we were headed for One World.

President Obama, in his own way, is a One Worlder. In his 2009 Cairo speech, he called for a new era of understanding between America and the Muslim world. It would be a world based on "mutual respect, and . . . upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles."

The president's hope was that moderate Muslims would eagerly accept this invitation to be friends. The extremist minority—nonstate actors like al Qaeda—could then be picked off with drones.

Of course, this hasn't gone according to plan. And a perfect illustration of the futility of this approach, and the superiority of the Huntingtonian model, is the recent behavior of Turkey.

According to the One World view, Turkey is an island of Muslim moderation in a sea of extremism. Successive American presidents have urged the EU to accept Turkey as a member on this assumption. But the illusion of Turkey as the West's moderate friend in the Muslim world has been shattered.

A year ago Turkey's President Recep Erdogan congratulated Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his re-election after he blatantly stole the presidency. Then Turkey joined forces with Brazil to try to dilute the American-led effort to tighten U.N. sanctions aimed at stopping Iran's nuclear arms program. Most recently, Turkey sponsored the "aid flotilla" designed to break Israel's blockade of Gaza and to hand Hamas a public relations victory.

True, there remain secularists in Istanbul who revere the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Republic of Turkey. But they have no hold over the key government ministries, and their grip over the army is slipping. Today the talk in Istanbul is quite openly about an "Ottoman alternative," which harks back to the days when the Sultan ruled over an empire that stretched from North Africa to the Caucasus.

If Turkey can no longer be relied on to move towards the West, who in the Muslim world can be? All the Arab countries except Iraq—a precarious democracy created by the United States—are ruled by despots of various stripes. And all the opposition groups that have any meaningful support among the local populations are run by Islamist outfits like the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

In Indonesia and Malaysia, Islamist movements are demanding the expansion of Shariah law. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak's time is running out. Should the U.S. support the installation of his son? If so, the rest of the Muslim world will soon be accusing the Obama administration of double standards—if elections for Iraq, why not for Egypt? Analysts have observed that in free and fair elections, a Muslim Brotherhood victory cannot be ruled out.

Algeria? Somalia? Sudan? It is hard to think of a single predominantly Muslim country that is behaving according to the One World script.

The greatest advantage of Huntington's civilizational model of international relations is that it reflects the world as it is—not as we wish it to be. It allows us to distinguish friends from enemies. And it helps us to identify the internal conflicts within civilizations, particularly the historic rivalries between Arabs, Turks and Persians for leadership of the Islamic world.

But divide and rule cannot be our only policy. We need to recognize the extent to which the advance of radical Islam is the result of an active propaganda campaign. According to a CIA report written in 2003, the Saudis invested at least $2 billion a year over a 30-year period to spread their brand of fundamentalist Islam. The Western response in promoting our own civilization was negligible.

Our civilization is not indestructible: It needs to be actively defended. This was perhaps Huntington's most important insight. The first step towards winning this clash of civilizations is to understand how the other side is waging it—and to rid ourselves of the One World illusion.

Ms. Ali, a former member of the Dutch parliament, is the author of "Nomad: From Islam to America—A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations," which has just been published by Free Press.

(5) Infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in Fallujah 'worse than Hiroshima'

From: Keith Lampe <us.exile.govt@gmail.com> Date: 29.07.2010 02:33 PM

Toxic Legacy of US Assault on Fallujah 'Worse Than Hiroshima'

The shocking rates of infant mortality and cancer in Iraqi city raise new questions about battle

by Patrick Cockburn

Published on Saturday, July 24, 2010 by The Independent/UK

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/07/24-0

Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study.

Iraqi doctors in Fallujah have complained since 2005 of being overwhelmed by the number of babies with serious birth defects, ranging from a girl born with two heads to paralysis of the lower limbs. They said they were also seeing far more cancers than they did before the battle for Fallujah between US troops and insurgents.

Their claims have been supported by a survey showing a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. Infant mortality in the city is more than four times higher than in neighbouring Jordan and eight times higher than in Kuwait.

Dr Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster and one of the authors of the survey of 4,800 individuals in Fallujah, said it is difficult to pin down the exact cause of the cancers and birth defects. He added that "to produce an effect like this, some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks happened".

US Marines first besieged and bombarded Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad, in April 2004 after four employees of the American security company Blackwater were killed and their bodies burned. After an eight-month stand-off, the Marines stormed the city in November using artillery and aerial bombing against rebel positions. US forces later admitted that they had employed white phosphorus as well as other munitions.

In the assault US commanders largely treated Fallujah as a free-fire zone to try to reduce casualties among their own troops. British officers were appalled by the lack of concern for civilian casualties. "During preparatory operations in the November 2004 Fallujah clearance operation, on one night over 40 155mm artillery rounds were fired into a small sector of the city," recalled Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, a British commander serving with the American forces in Baghdad.

He added that the US commander who ordered this devastating use of firepower did not consider it significant enough to mention it in his daily report to the US general in command. Dr Busby says that while he cannot identify the type of armaments used by the Marines, the extent of genetic damage suffered by inhabitants suggests the use of uranium in some form. He said: "My guess is that they used a new weapon against buildings to break through walls and kill those inside."

The survey was carried out by a team of 11 researchers in January and February this year who visited 711 houses in Fallujah. A questionnaire was filled in by householders giving details of cancers, birth outcomes and infant mortality. Hitherto the Iraqi government has been loath to respond to complaints from civilians about damage to their health during military operations.

Researchers were initially regarded with some suspicion by locals, particularly after a Baghdad television station broadcast a report saying a survey was being carried out by terrorists and anybody conducting it or answering questions would be arrested. Those organising the survey subsequently arranged to be accompanied by a person of standing in the community to allay suspicions.

The study, entitled "Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005-2009", is by Dr Busby, Malak Hamdan and Entesar Ariabi, and concludes that anecdotal evidence of a sharp rise in cancer and congenital birth defects is correct. Infant mortality was found to be 80 per 1,000 births compared to 19 in Egypt, 17 in Jordan and 9.7 in Kuwait. The report says that the types of cancer are "similar to that in the Hiroshima survivors who were exposed to ionising radiation from the bomb and uranium in the fallout".

Researchers found a 38-fold increase in leukaemia, a ten-fold increase in female breast cancer and significant increases in lymphoma and brain tumours in adults. At Hiroshima survivors showed a 17-fold increase in leukaemia, but in Fallujah Dr Busby says what is striking is not only the greater prevalence of cancer but the speed with which it was affecting people.

Of particular significance was the finding that the sex ratio between newborn boys and girls had changed. In a normal population this is 1,050 boys born to 1,000 girls, but for those born from 2005 there was an 18 per cent drop in male births, so the ratio was 850 males to 1,000 females. The sex-ratio is an indicator of genetic damage that affects boys more than girls. A similar change in the sex-ratio was discovered after Hiroshima.

The US cut back on its use of firepower in Iraq from 2007 because of the anger it provoked among civilians. But at the same time there has been a decline in healthcare and sanitary conditions in Iraq since 2003. The impact of war on civilians was more severe in Fallujah than anywhere else in Iraq because the city continued to be blockaded and cut off from the rest of the country long after 2004. War damage was only slowly repaired and people from the city were frightened to go to hospitals in Baghdad because of military checkpoints on the road into the capital.

(6) Fallujah children's 'genetic damage'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-10721562

21 July 2010 Last updated at 21:50 GMT

Cancer, leukaemia and infant mortality are all increasing in the Iraqi town of Fallujah, which saw fierce fighting between US forces and Sunni insurgents, a new survey says.

Still one of the most dangerous places in Iraq, doctors have been reporting a large number of birth defects since the 2004 offensive.

John Simpson reports. {visit link to see video}