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Hey, We got beat Fair and Square
Mike Whitney
The hearings for Robert Gates were about as weird as it gets. Gates wasn’t asked one tough question the whole time. It was all a meaningless formality. Besides, Gates had all the qualifications the senate was looking for. In other words, he wasn’t Rumsfeld and that’s all that mattered. For Gates it was more like Coronation Day than a serious inquiry into past indiscretions. Did anyone care about his involvement in Iran-Contra and his propensity to “fix the intelligence to fit the policy” or were they too busy showering him with praise? And, what happened to our tough new Democratic majority? Did the midterm elections really change anything? Oh, yeah; we traded a rubber-stamp Republican congress for a rubber-stamp Democratic congress. Now that’s progress. No one bothered to ask Gates how he felt about military tribunals, although that will be one of his many responsibilities as Secretary of Defense…
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The Uncensored Anger Manifesto – Part II
Layla Anwar
So, you are stuck in a quagmire huh? No shit Sherlock. What did you expect then ? Did you expect a cake walk or did you think you will be tanning your ass in Baghdad like you do when you go on your yearly Caribbean vacation? Yeah I know, you managed to have a little fun raping “Eye Raqis “ from little girls, to boys , to women and men . And I also know that a good deal of you managed to pocket a few hefty bundles of dollars . Some through dubious contracts and some through sheer theft . Stealing the palaces , the houses and even the huts . Don’t ever think anything goes unreported. Or maybe you thought that you can walk into our holy places with your filthy boots, spit and piss on our holy book and kill our preachers and worshippers when in prostration at dawn and we will just stand there and turn the other cheek? Or maybe you thought we will give you candies and roses or better still make a statue in your honor , a statue dedicated to Freedom and Democracy?…
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The Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline
Xymphora
Strange as it may seem, Israeli interests still owe Iran a considerable amount of money for oil supplied to Israel before the fall of the Shah (another motive for a debt-clearing Israeli war on Iran?). There are a series of secret ongoing arbitrations, which have already resulted in an award in favor of the Iranians, but there are possibly hundreds of millions of dollars left to be awarded. Needless to say: “The approach Israel adopted since the start of the discussions on the various issues is one of deliberate foot-dragging. For years Israel even refused to pay the salaries and expenses of the arbitrators. Only recently has the company begun to pay its share of the arbitration. Moreover, Israel raised counter-claims, accused Iran of dispatch responsibility for the situation that was created, and did everything possible to avoid paying Iran a single penny. The only ones benefiting from the situation are the lawyers and the arbitrators, who receive generous salaries for their efforts.” By the way, in its entire existence, has Israel actually paid, using its own money, for anything? There is a big plan…
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Lynching Saddam – Part 9: “arbitrary detention”
Gabriele Zamparini
This past summer, as a note to a piece on the role of the so-called international community in this scandal, I wrote that Saddam Hussein is “a head of state KIDNAPPED by a foreign power while committing the “crime against the peace”, the “war of aggression” against Iraq. He’s now held HOSTAGE by that foreign power together with the illegitimate so-called “government” of Iraq”. The AFP reported just a few days ago: Saddam Hussein’s trial fell so far short of international standards that his detention was “arbitrary”, and as such the death sentence should not be carried out, a working party of the United Nations Human Rights Council has said. “The non-observance of the relevant international standards during Mr. Hussein’s trial was of such gravity as to confer Mr. Hussein’s deprivation of liberty an arbitrary character,” the Council’s working group on arbitrary detention said Tuesday. (…) But since the Insane Society keeps paralyzing our brains, the AFP goes on: However the working group on arbitrary detention stressed it was not calling for Saddam Hussein to be released…
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Is Comment Free at the Guardian? Only if you are a Zionist running a smear campaign: the strange case of Gilad Atzmon
peacepalestine
The Guardian’s blog section, Comment is Free allowed an article to be printed that was nothing but a Kangaroo Court against Gilad Atzmon. They did not allow his reply to be reprinted, but an edited version to go in the comments section for a day. Here is the full version. So that Comment is really free…
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Send the Neocons to Iraq
Kurt Nimmo
“With the situation in Iraq ‘grave and deteriorating,’ the United States must begin the process of shifting troops out of the country, members of a bipartisan panel said Wednesday. But at the same time, the group recommended, the Bush administration must make sure that it has sufficient civilian personnel in Iraq—if necessary, by ordering some employees to serve there,” reports the National Journal Group. “The nature of the mission in Iraq is unfamiliar and dangerous, and the United States has had great difficulty filling civilian assignments in Iraq with sufficient numbers of properly trained personnel at the appropriate rank,” wrote the Iraq Study Group. If people can’t be found to fill the position, “directed assignments” should be the result. Good idea. And I know who should make the short list…
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Kurds and Israelis unhappy with the turn of events
Arablinks.blogspot.com
Kurdish television said that a leader of one of the two big Kurdish parties (Barzani’s party, the other is led by Talabani) urged Kurdish leaders to declare the independence of Kurdistan as of this coming March 21, which is new-years. The official, who is also Minister of Culture in the Kurdistan regional government, said such a move would “strengthen the Kurdish position in the regional calculations,” and he said: “The treatment of Kurdistan by the central [Iraqi] goverment has not been in keeping with the contributions that we have made to the political process in Iraq, moreover the American administration aims at disregarding the Kurdish importance in local and regional equations…
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DAILY WAR NEWS FOR THURSDAY, December 7, 2006
Today in Iraq
Ten American troops died in Iraq on Wednesday, the U.S. military reported, matching the highest number of U.S. service members killed on a single day in the past year. The U.S. troops died in four incidents, a military spokesman, Lt. Col. Christopher C. Garver, said Wednesday night. He declined to provide details about how or where they were killed because family members were still being notified. The U.S. military confirmed Thursday that another soldier died in fighting the day before, raising to 11 the number of American troops killed in a single day. The soldier was shot Wednesday while manning a machine gun nest on the roof of an outpost in Anbar province, according to an Associated Press reporter who was on the scene. The military also released details about five of the other troops killed on Wednesday, saying they were Task Force Lightning soldiers who were struck by a roadside bomb while conducting combat operations in vicinity of the northern city of Kirkuk…
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Meese of Arabia and the Baker Group’s Grab for Black Gold
Chris Floyd, Empire Burlesque
The reaction from actual Iraqis on the just-released report by the “Iraq Study Group”? They don’t like it; it won’t work; it’s largely a tissue of fantasies and shows no grasp of the true situation in Iraq; it has nothing to do with solving Iraq’s problems but everything to do with the American Establishment’s desperate attempt to save face, no matter how many people must be slaughtered in the process. But why should we listen to these wretched malcontents in Iraq? How the hell could they know more about the reality of their lives than Jim “Bagman” Baker and Lee “Whitewash for Hire” Hamilton and Harriet “Here’s the PB&J, George” Miers and Ed “Porn Man” Meese? I mean, come on: who on God’s green earth knows more about the political, social, ethnic, historical, religious and military complexities of Iraq than Ed Meese? The Heritage Foundation’s Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy? Man, he’s the go-to guy for all things Iraqi!…
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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Thursday, 7 December 2006
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice
In a bulletin posted at 2:38pm Makkah time Thursday afternoon, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that a short while earlier US occupation troops had raided al-Fallujah General Hospital, ostensibly searching for Resistance fighters, whom they referred to as “gunmen.” The correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported eyewitnesses as saying that many US Marines had surrounded the hospital and then stormed inside to search for Resistance fighters who, they claimed, were receiving treatment there. The witnesses said that the Americans broke down numerous doors and windows in the hospital, rampaging through the building on what they called a “search.”…
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Shiaa factions were behind the Sadr City explosions on the 23rd November – video footage attached
Iraqi League
Most of the media. residents of Sadr city, and Iraqi Shiaa population have blamed Sunni groups for the series of explosions that left over 200 civilians dead and many injured on the 23rd November. However, the Iraqi League managed recently to obtain a mobile-phone video footage shot by members of Mehdi army while they were interrogating a young man called (Firas Abdul-Zahra Al-Rikabi). He admitted to have planted bombs in the midst of labourers in an area called (55 square) in Sadr city, which is frequented by building work labourers and shoppers. In the video, Al-Rikabi confirmed that he was Shiaa, also confirmed that a man called Hakam, also Shiaa, had paid him $200 to plant the bombs, which he detonated using a “blue” remote control device…
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Video: 30 soldiers dead in first week of December in Iraq
David Edwards
CNN’s Nick Roberson provides an ominous report, live from Iraq, one day after the Iraq Study Group report was released calling the situation “grave and deteriorating.” “They are very terrible statistics, Soledat,” Roberson says. “We know now that 30 soldiers have died, now, in the first week of December. That is a very high and alarming statistic for US casulaties.” …
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Say Hello to the Goodbye Weapon
David Hambling
The crowd is getting ugly. Soldiers roll up in a Hummer. Suddenly, the whole right half of your body is screaming in agony. You feel like you’ve been dipped in molten lava. You almost faint from shock and pain, but instead you stumble backwards — and then start running. To your surprise, everyone else is running too. In a few seconds, the street is completely empty. You’ve just been hit with a new nonlethal weapon that has been certified for use in Iraq — even though critics argue there may be unforeseen effects. According to documents obtained for Wired News under federal sunshine laws, the Air Force’s Active Denial System, or ADS, has been certified safe after lengthy tests by military scientists in the lab and in war games…
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Odwan urges Maliki’s government to protect Palestinians in Iraq
palestine-info.co.uk
The noticeable increase in numbers of Palestinian refugees killed and kidnapped in Iraq has apparently spurred PA refugee affairs’ ministry to urge the government of Iraqi premier Nuri Al-Maliki to protect Palestinian refugees in his country. In an open letter he sent to Maliki, Dr. Atef Odwan, the PA refugees’ affairs minister, deplored the unexplainable silence on the part of the Iraqi government vis-à-vis those heinous crimes, and called on the Iraqi clergymen and high-ranking religious leaders to shoulder their religious and human duties in sparing lives of those innocent refugees.
Scores of Palestinian refugees in Iraq were killed or kidnapped at the hands of armed militias affiliated with a number of Iraqi political parties and sanctioned by the American occupation forces since the American invasion of that Arab country in 2003…
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Baker’s report brought nothing to the Iraqis
Roads to Iraq
The report did not presented anything new to the Iraqis and did not contribute directly or indirectly to solve the problem. In this report the Americans are interested to run away from Iraq with the biggest bounty possible. The report is useful in terms of being the first American declaration of defeat and the the failure of the American occupation in Iraq and the US “kingdom come” around the world. You can see this from the weakest points of the reports as Al-Quds newspaper put it: First: the report ignored the main party in Iraq right now. It is the Iraqi resistance of various factions…
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One day U.S. Iraq death total rises to 11
UPI
A U.S. soldier in a machine gun nest in Ramadi was shot and killed Wednesday, bringing deaths among U.S. forces in Iraq for the day to 11. The single day total was one of the highest since the war began in 2003, CBS News reported. Earlier, authorities had reported the deaths of 10 U.S. soldiers in four incidents. Five of the dead were members of Task Force Lightning and were operating near Kirkuk in the north. They were killed by a roadside bomb…
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US and Israel Targeting DNA in Gaza? The DIME Bomb: Yet another genotoxic weapon, Part III
James Brooks
Since early July, Israeli forces have been using a new weapon in the Gaza Strip that inflicts strange and deadly wounds. Doctors and medics say the unidentified device has significantly increased fatalities from Israel’s attacks. In the first two parts of this article we reviewed evidence that Israel’s new weapon may be Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME), a “low collateral damage” weapon developed by the US Air Force. The DIME bomb’s “micro-shrapnel” is reportedly made of HMTA, a tungsten alloy that disrupts body biochemistry, damages the immune system, rapidly causes cancer, and attacks DNA (genotoxic)…
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Victory Celebration? Not So Fast!
ddjango
…The American Left, rather than being vindicated in the just-passed election, has once again failed itself. We (for I am one of us) have squandered the best opportunity to gain power we’ve had in many years. Instead of finding common cause and unity among the fractionalized parties, institutions, and “sects” on the Left, we chose to put much useless effort into things like “reforming” the Democratic Party under Howard Dean, simplistically focusing on whether Bush is crazy or not, demanding the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, and trying to get at the truth about who outed Valerie Plame (it was, in essence, Robert Novak)…
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Khiam bomb crater tests positive for uranium
Daily Star staff
Tests carried out on samples taken from a bomb crater in the southern region of Khiam following the summer war with Israel showed the presence of uranium, Chris Busby, the British scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, told Environment and Development magazine for its December issue. “The analysis was accurate and showed the presence of depleted uranium,” Busby said in a telephone interview with Environment Hotline, an environmental research team affiliated with the magazine. Busby said in late October that samples taken from a bomb crater in Khiam had been sent for analysis to the Harwell laboratory in Oxfordshire, southern England. He added, at the time, that “samples thrown up by Israeli bombs showed elevated radiation signatures resulting from a new experimental weapon used by Israel.”…
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Flirting With Fascism on CNN Headline News
Host Glenn Beck threatens Muslims with concentration camps
FAIR
The New York Times (12/4/06), profiling new CNN Headline News host Glenn Beck, called him “brash” and “opinionated,” with an “unfiltered approach.” The conservative talk-radio host-turned-cable news announcer, the paper reported, “take[s] credit for saying what others are feeling but are afraid to say.” (…) On his August 10 radio show, distributed by Clear Channel’s Premiere Radio Networks, Beck told listeners, “The world is on the brink of World War III,” then issued this warning: All you Muslims who have sat on your frickin’ hands the whole time and have not been marching in the streets and have not been saying, ‘Hey, you know what? There are good Muslims and bad Muslims. We need to be the first ones in the recruitment office lining up to shoot the bad Muslims in the head.’ I’m telling you, with God as my witness… human beings are not strong enough, unfortunately, to restrain themselves from putting up razor wire and putting you on one side of it. When things—when people become hungry, when people see that their way of life is on the edge of being over, they will put razor wire up and just based on the way you look or just based on your religion, they will round you up…
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Shiaa factions were behind the Sadr City explosions on the 23rd November – video footage attached
Iraqi League
Most of the media. residents of Sadr city, and Iraqi Shiaa population have blamed Sunni groups for the series of explosions that left over 200 civilians dead and many injured on the 23rd November. However, the Iraqi League managed recently to obtain a mobile-phone video footage shot by members of Mehdi army while they were interrogating a young man called (Firas Abdul-Zahra Al-Rikabi). He admitted to have planted bombs in the midst of labourers in an area called (55 square) in Sadr city, which is frequented by building work labourers and shoppers. In the video, Al-Rikabi confirmed that he was Shiaa, also confirmed that a man called Hakam, also Shiaa, had paid him $200 to plant the bombs, which he detonated using a “blue” remote control device…
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