Meanwhile, in Recently Liberated Iraq...

A manhunt is under way for hundreds of inmates, including four high-ranking al-Qaeda members, who escaped two Iraqi prisons following deadly attacks.

Fifty-six people were killed in Sunday's attacks on Taji prison, north of Baghdad, and the Abu Ghraib facility, west of the Iraqi capital.

The dead include 26 members of the security forces and 20 inmates. Ten of the attackers also died.

  alJzeera

The digital rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is leading an unlikely and broad coalition of 19 groups to sue the National Security Agency on account of its surveillance program that collects the telephone records of American citizens.

  Mashable

And here’s your weapons of mass destruction:

Cancer is more common than flu in the Iraqi city of Najaf, about 160 km south of Baghdad, one local doctor told RT. After the start of the war rates of leukemia and birth defects “rose dramatically” due to use of depleted uranium by the US military.

“Every single residential street that we’ve visited in several neighborhoods, we found multiple cases of families whose children were ill, families who had lost children who had to bury children, families who had many relatives who were suffering from cancer,” RT correspondent Lucy Kafanov said.

Dr. Chris Busby has researched the effects of depleted uranium in detail. He says the only source of uranium in Iraq was the use by the American-led forces of uranium weapons.

[...]

Another report, funded by the Norwegian government, has recently found that depleted uranium was used against civilian targets in populated areas in Iraq, in 2003. It emphasizes a lack of transparency by coalition forces over the use of depleted uranium, but also describes one incident in Najaf where a Bradley armored fighting vehicle fired 305 depleted uranium rounds in a single engagement.

  RT