1/10/07

Palestinians in Iraq tortured, ill-treated: Amnesty
AFP
Thousands of Palestinian refugees in Iraq have been ill-treated, with many of them abducted, tortured and murdered by armed Shiite Muslim groups, Amnesty International said in a report published Monday. The London-based human rights group issued an urgent appeal to the Shiite-led Iraqi government, US-led coalition and international community to take concrete steps to protect the Palestinians. “Palestinian refugees in Iraq have been subjected to gross human rights abuses including abduction, hostage-taking, unlawful killing, torture and other ill-treatment at the hands of armed militia groups,” it said…

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Torture and rape reported in Iraqi children prisons
Kareem Zair, Azzaman
Even children can be detained in Iraq placed in special jails. But that is not enough. They can also be raped, tortured and burned. That is the new picture emerging from the U.S.-led ‘liberation’ of a country that has been bleeding since U.S. and allies invaded it in 2003. The children languish in prisons administered by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government. It seems the only story of success U.S. invaders and their Iraqi lackeys can boast of is the construction of numerous prisons now available across the country.
Arab satellite television channels shocked their viewers last week when they aired footage of children bearing marks of torture. The children were detained during military operations in Baghdad neighborhoods of Adhamiya, Latifiya, Doura and Hay al-Amel. The children had no capacity to commit any wrongdoing but they were jailed because they carried names revealing their sectarian identity…

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Jebril: Abbas and Fayyadh derive legitimacy from USA and Israel
Palestinian Information Center
Ahmad Jebril, one of the veteran PLO leaders and secretary-general of the PFLP-GC said on Sunday that PA chief Mahmoud Abbas and head of the PA “illegitimate” government Salam Fayyadh were deriving their legitimacy from the USA, Israel, and a number of Arab countries conniving with them. In an interview with the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, Jebril affirmed that both “Abbas and Fayyadh don’t enjoy a bit of respect among the Palestinian people in the homeland or the diaspora”. “Where do they (Abbas and Fayyadh) derive their legitimacy from? It is clear that they derive it from their warm relations with the USA, Israel, and a number of Arab countries collaborating against the Palestinian people”, Gerbil underlined…

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Iran ready to work with US and stabilise Iraq
Roula Khalaf and Najmeh Bozorgmehr, Financial Times
Iran is ready to help the US stabilise Iraq if Washington presents a timetable for a withdrawal of its troops, Tehran’s top security official said on Sunday (…) He said Iran was the only country in the region to have supported the Iraqi government and the democratic process, while the US’s allies – by which he meant Arab governments – provided no assistance and worked against Washington. He also claimed Tehran had information that US officials were holding talks with Izzat al-Douri, the former Ba’athist senior official who is said to be leading parts of the Sunni insurgency. “This is a disaster for the Iraqi people,” he said…

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Israel’s Toy Soldiers
Chris Hedges, Truthdig
If you are a young Muslim American and head off to the Middle East for a spell in a fundamentalist “madrassa,” or religious school, Homeland Security will probably greet you at the airport when you return. But if you are an American Jew and you join hundreds of teenagers from Europe and Mexico for an eight-week training course run by the Israel Defense Forces, you can post your picture wearing an Israeli army uniform and holding an automatic weapon on MySpace. The Marva program, part summer camp part indoctrination, was launched in Israel in 1981. It allows participants, who must be Jewish and between the ages of 18 and 28, to fire weapons, live in military barracks in the Negev desert and saunter around in an Israeli military uniform saluting and taking long hikes with military packs. The Youth and Education Corps of the Israel Defense Forces run four 120-strong training sessions a year…

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Tamimi accuses Israel of converting the Ibrahimi mosque into synagogue
Palestinian Information Center
Palestinian chief justice Sheikh Tayseer Al-Tamimi, on Sunday, has accused the Israeli occupation government of transforming the Muslim Ibrahimi Mosque located in the heart of the West Bank town of Al-Khalil city into a Jewish Synagogue. According to Tamimi, the Israeli attempt considered flagrant violation and undermining of the Palestinian people right to worship, charging that the IOF troops’ closure of the Mosque before Muslims and allowing tens of Israeli settlers into it was meant to tighten the grip on the Mosque and to gradually convert it to a synagogue…

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Hamas sources: “Several prisoners at a P.A prisons hospitalized due to extreme torture”
IMEMC News
Sources close to Hamas movement reported on Sunday that a Hamas supporter imprisoned in Al Jneid Palestinian prison, in the northern West Bank city of Nablus, was hospitalized on Sunday afternoon after being extremely tortured by the interrogators. Several other prisoners were recently hospitalized due to torture in Palestinian prisons. The sources stated that Rasim Al Khattab, 31, was transferred to Rafidia hospital in Nablus. Eyewitnesses reported that Al Khattab was moved to the hospital by Palestinian security men who covered his face with a black bag but his brother was accidentally at the hospital and managed to identify him by his clothes…

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GI Special 5I25: 80% [ September 29, 2007 ]
Thomas F. Barton
“The Veterans Administration Determined He Was 80 % Disabled”
“We Were In The Middle Of Getting The VA Paperwork Filed With The Marines When They Tried Calling Him Back For A Third Tour”
“He Was Telling Me About How The Occupation Was Destroying People’s Lives”

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OPT: Dozens of Palestinians sift through rubbish tips to survive
IRIN News
For some West Bank Palestinians rubbish has become not only a livelihood but the only method of survival they know. Many dozens of Palestinians across the territory, including children, work at landfill sites, trying to earn a meagre living. “This is very hard work here. My hands are all cut up, it smells. But what can I do? There’s no work in Ramallah,” said Muhammad, from Al-Bireh, a nearby town. Aged 43, he has worked for the last 30 years – apart from a stint in jail – in the Psagot landfill site, sifting through the rubbish in search of scrap metal. Muhammed, like the other 40 or so workers, including 20 children, is not officially employed by anyone, but he sells what he can to dealers he knows…

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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Sunday, 30 September 2007
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. www.freearabvoice.org
In a dispatch posted at 10:31pm Baghdad time Sunday night, the Aswat al-’Iraq news agency, which was set up by Reuters and the U.N. Development Agency, reported that the US military had admitted that a bomb exploded by an American patrol in eastern Baghdad on Saturday. Aswat al-’Iraq reported the US military as saying that after the blast, fighters opened fire on the Americans with small arms. The American statement indicated that one US soldier was killed and a second one wounded in that attack…

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Fatah video hoax aims to smear Hamas
KHALED ABU TOAMEH, Jerusalem Post
As part of a campaign to discredit Hamas, Fatah has been using a video showing the killing of a girl in Iraq as “evidence” of Hamas’s “atrocities” in the Gaza Strip. On Friday, officials from the Fatah-controlled General Intelligence contacted The Jerusalem Post, offering the “exclusive” video and story for publication in Sunday’s Post. They claimed that it provided fresh evidence of Hamas’s “barbarity.” The officials even gave the Post the phone numbers of two men in the Gaza Strip who claimed that they had witnessed the “honor killing” of the 16-year-old girl. The two confirmed (by phone) that they had witnessed the lynching of the girl in the Gaza Strip…

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Statement of the Front of Jihad and Reform on the positions of Tariq al-Hashimi
The Jihad and Reform Front – Translated by Muhammad Abu Nasr
The strange and disagreeablt things that the Islamic Party issues have become routine. It wasn’t the first time that he did such things when Muhsin Abd al-Hamid gave a speech after the occupation of Iraq where he said that we set up the Islamic Party with the blessing of Sayyid Muhsin al-Hakim and proposed at
that time to set up an advancement board that could address the Shi’i religious authorities. Then he entered the governing council of ill repute, conferring legality upon the occupation, sowing rot and ruin and pushing the country from bad to worse…

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IRAQ: Pentagon Gives Blackwater New Contract
Ali Gharib
A U.S.-based private security firm received a contract worth up to 92 million dollars from the Department of Defence amid hard questions about its involvement in two separate violent incidents in Iraq. “Blackwater has been a contractor in the past with the department and could certainly be in the future,” said the U.S.’s top-ranking military officer, General Peter Pace, at an afternoon press conference here. The future arrived just two hours later when the Pentagon released a new list of contracts — Presidential Airways, the aviation unit of parent company Blackwater, was awarded the contract to fly Department of Defence passengers and cargo between locations around central Asia…

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If Wishes Were Horses
Anwaar Hussain
If wishes were horses, most Americans would have known that Iraq and Afghanistan are just the latest victims of the colonial behemoth in a continued saga of American imperialism and not any thing else. That throughout its imperialistic expedition, Americans have firmly believed that the United States was God’s chosen nation and, therefore, on course to divine destinies. They would have known Senator Albert J. Beveridge’s speech to Congress that exemplifies this American attitude as nothing else does, “…and thanksgiving to Almighty God that He has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world…” If wishes were horses…

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Ministry of detainees: “60 thousand Palestinians were kidnapped in the past seven years”
IMEMC Staff
The Palestinian Ministry of detainees and ex-detainees, released on Saturday a statistical report revealing a noticeable increase on the abduction policy carried out by the Israeli army against the Palestinians since the outbreak of the Al Aqsa Intifada seven years ago. The ministry affirmed that the Israeli army had abducted around 60,000 residents; around ten thousand and five hundred of them are still imprisoned in Israeli jails, in addition to 543 who are detained before the outbreak of the current Intifada…

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Taliban rejects Karzai talks offer
Aljazeera.net
Afghanistan’s Taliban has rejected an offer of peace talks from Hamid Karzai, the country’s president, a spokesman for the group has said. Qari Mohammad Yousuf, a Taliban spokesman, told Reuters news agency from an undisclosed location on Sunday that talks with Kabul were out of the question all the time foreign troops remain in the country. He said: “Karzai government is a dummy government. It has no authority so why should we waste our time and effort?” (…) Karzai had said he would allocate some government posts to the Taliban and that both Hekmatyar and Omar could stand in the elections, due to be held in 2009, if they wanted power.,,

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IRAQ: Closure of Iranian border affects Kurdistan region’s economy
IRIN News
Aid agencies in the northern semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan have said the continuing closure of Iraq’s border with Iran will not hamper their work as they do not use the Iranian border for getting supplies. However, Azad Ahmed, a 45-year old pharmacist in Sulaimaniyah, said that although medicines are imported from neighbouring countries other than Iran some critical items do come from Iran as well. “There are a lot of items which come from Turkey, Jordan and Syria but we have some important medical items which are imported from Iran such as painkillers, syringes, cough syrup and optic medicines,” Ahmed said…

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* * * NOT SATIRE * * *
Nouri Al -Maliki: I spared Iraq a Sectarian War
Raghida Dergham, Al-Hayat
Iraqi prime minister, Nouri Al-Maliki asserted that national conciliation is his good choice to resolve political and security conflicts. In an interview with Al-Hayat in New York where he was attending the UN General Assembly session, he stated that militias are an alien phenomenon that he will fight along with every outlaw, be it Sunni or Shiite. He denied that his cabinet has failed because the destruction inherited from the previous regime and caused by the militias is too massive. He added, “I saved Iraq from a sectarian war.” While he expressed his reservations toward the Iranian and Syrian roles in Iraq, Al-Maliki felt a positive change in both countries. He also pledged that his cabinet will not allow any intervention in its affairs nor would it allow Iraq to turn into a launch pad for a US attack on any country in the region…

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News of the Day for Sunday, September 30, 2007
Iraq today
One MND-Baghdad soldier killed, one injured by IED and small arms attack in Baghdad on Saturday. No further details given. Iraqi defense ministry says 40 militants killed during operations in northern provinces. Also, U.S. says 2 insurgents killed and 21 people detained in operations in various cities…

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Sunday: 2 GIs, 117 Iraqis Killed; 16 Iraqis Wounded
Margaret Griffis, Antiwar.com
A significant number of militia suspects and other gunmen were killed in numerous incidents around the country. Overall, 117 Iraqis were killed or found dead and another 16 were wounded. Also, one MND-B soldier was killed and another wounded during combat in Baghdad yesterday. In Mosul, 11 dumped bodies were found; they bore gunshot and torture marks. A Ninevah council member and three guards were killed when gunmen sprayed their vehicle with bullets. Gunmen attacked a market, killing two people. Two women and a man were killed in a drive-by shooting. Gunmen killed two policemen in an eastern neighborhood. Also, a roadside bomb wounded two policemen. Seven decomposing bodies were found in al-Uhaymer, near Baquba… The bodies of three torture victims were found in al-Haswa.

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More on the Biden Amendment, Russia, Myanmar…
karlmarxwasright
…Biden may not be well known on the outside, but, he is a major Congressional policy maker, Chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a nexus of corporate and Congressional power elite in this country. Biden is the Senator from the small state of Delaware. Delaware, like the Arab Gulf countries, is a corporation disguised as a state, home to Dupont, amongst its other notable attributes. Biden, for example, was one amongst the “principals” who met with Pakistan’s former ISI Chief, General Mahmoud Ahmad during Ahmad’s visit to Washington from September 4-11, 2001. Biden met with Ahmad on September 13, 2001…

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