On Sept. 19 Honduran defense minister Federico Breve ordered an investigation into a camp the Chicago-based firm Your Solutions was running in the community of Lepaterique to train security personnel for work in US-occupied Iraq. The Honduran daily La Tribuna revealed the training camp's existence, apparently based on evidence from a disgruntled sergeant identified as Wilmer Ruiz.

The company reportedly contracted to send 600 men to Iraq in or before October; it had already sent 36 Hondurans and was planning to send another 353 Hondurans, along with 211 Chileans. Benjamin Canales, Your Solutions director in Honduras, told the recruits they would be paid $900 to $1,500 a month during their six-month tours in Iraq. They were reportedly being trained by US and Chilean teachers in facilities of the state-owned Honduran Forest Development Corporation in a mountainous region 30 km northwest of Tegucigalpa. The instructors "explained to us that where we were going everyone would be our enemy, and we'd have to look at them that way, because they would want to kill us, and the gringos too," an unidentified trainee told the AFP wire service. "So we'd have to be heartless when it was up to us to kill someone, even it was a child."

Agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shot dead fugitive Puerto Rican nationalist leader Filiberto Ojeda Rios on Sept. 23 in the western town of Hormigueros at a farmhouse where he had been staying secretly with his wife, Elma Beatriz Rosado Barbosa. "He opened the front door of his house and opened fire on the agents," Luis Fraticelli, special agent in charge of the FBI in Puerto Rico, told a press conference on Sept. 24. "We went to arrest him, but when the gunfire started we had to defend ourselves." Fraticelli claimed one agent was wounded. Rosado Barbosa was detained but was released unharmed a day later without charges, according to her lawyer, Julio Fontanet.

Ecuadoran troops destroyed a suspected Colombian guerilla camp near the jungle border between the two countries, Ecuador's defense ministry said Sept. 23. The camp was "probably used by irregular groups" from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the ministry said. The discovery adds to evidence that the FARC regularly crosses into Ecuador for refuge, BBC correspondents say. Bogota recently accused Ecuador of failing to crack down FARC activity.

The camp was discovered by an Ecuadoran army patrol in the province of Sucumbios. Officials said a nearby cocaine processing plant, assumed to belong to the FARC, was also destroyed. The statement appeared to contradict an earlier denial by Ecuador's Defence Minister Oswaldo Jarrin that Colombian armed groups operated in the country.

Army Pfc. Lynndie England, whose smiling poses in photos of detainee abuse at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison made her the face of the scandal, was convicted Sept. 26 by a military jury at Ft. Hood, TX. England, 22, was convicted on one charge of conspiracy, four charges of maltreating detainees and one charge of committing an indecent act. She was acquitted on a second conspiracy charge. The jury of five male Army officers took about two hours to reach its decision. Her case now moves to the sentencing phase, to be determined by the same jury. She faces a maximum 10 years in military prison.

England's trial is the last for a group of nine Army reservists charged with abuse of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib. Two others have been convicted and the remaining six made plea deals. Several of those soldiers testified at England's trial.

Chris Thompson writes for East Bay Express in Oakland, CA, Sept. 21:

War Pornography
US soldiers trade grisly photos of dead and mutilated Iraqis for access to amateur porn. The press is strangely silent.
If you want to see the true face of war, go to the amateur porn Web site NowThatsFuckedUp.com. For almost a year, American soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been taking photographs of dead bodies, many of them horribly mutilated or blown to pieces, and sending them to Web site administrator Chris Wilson. In return for letting him post these images, Wilson gives the soldiers free access to his site. American soldiers have been using the pictures of disfigured Iraqi corpses as currency to buy pornography.

A reference in a recent post on ethnic politics in eastern Anatolia to "the two Kurdish dialects of zaza and kurmanci" prompted the following letter from a reader, which we produce verbatim:

Zaza(Sassaniden)'s are not Kurds and not Turks

We fight for our liberty !
We fight against Turkish and Kurdish Fascism !
We fight against Turkish and Kurdish SS !

thes artickle is not correckt: http://classic.countervortex.org/node/352

Reports Sarah Ferguson in the Village Voice Sept. 25:

Citing a new report concluding that global warming threatens New Mexico's water supply, state and local officials are joining with environmentalists in demanding immediate steps to address the issue. The report, Less Snow, Less Water, was released Friday by the New Mexico Public Interest Research Group. The study concludes that due to rising global temperatures, precipitation that used to fall as snow is increasingly falling as rain in the West. Government snowpack-measurement records going back to 1961 indicate that snowpack levels have been below average for 11 of the past 16 years in the Colorado River Basin and for 10 of the past 16 years in the Rio Grande Basin, the study says.