Annals of Liberation: Iraqis Cite Another Massacre of Civilians by American Airpower
Chris Floyd , Empire Burlesque
…Thus let us properly appportion the guilt for the murder of these innocent people, especially the children. It belongs, first and foremost, to George W. Bush. Then, from this most rotten of heads, it flows down through all those in the Administration who planned, promoted and carried out the war crime, and to all those outside the Administration who championed it, and to all those who, like the majority of Democrats in Congress, countenanced it and funded it (and do so still), and so on and on, coursing through the natural gates and alleys of the whole body politic, barking it about, most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36974

Here is, True Solidarity for you.
Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues
Yesterday, I received the following e.mail from an American.
I was pleased to read it. In fact I read it many times. It is what I call an uplifting e.mail I salute this person’s honesty, integrity and courage. And these three qualities are uplifting to me. A piece of crystal in a pool of mud.
And as token of thanks, I am publishing his/her response for all to see.
Since I have not asked for prior consent, the name will be withheld (…) Far too many of the “antiwarriors” here also refuse to ever mention the crimes of the Zionist entity, or its role in pushing for US action against its enemies. Sometimes it is out of fear of being labeled antisemitic (a real enough fear, by the way), and other times it is because of the involvement of a fairly large number of “liberal Zionists” in the “antiwar” movement. I recall one “liberal zionist” woman who was speaking at a meeting in 1991 while the brutal assault on Iraq was taking place. She was literally crying. Her words were something to the effect of “I don’t like this war, but Saddam Hussein is so horrible, and he is attacking Israel. He has to be stopped!” Is it any wonder the “antiwar” movement here is so ineffective?…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36964

In Basra, vigilantes wage deadly campaign against women
Jay Price and Ali Omar al Basri | McClatchy Newspapers
Women in Basra have become the targets of a violent campaign by religious extremists, who leave more than 15 female bodies scattered around the city each month, police officers say. Maj. Gen. Abdel Jalil Khalaf, the commander of Basra’s police, said Thursday that self-styled enforcers of religious law threatened, beat and sometimes shot women who they believed weren’t sufficiently Muslim. “This is a new type of terror that Basra is not familiar with,” he said. “These gangs represent only themselves, and they are far outside religious, forgiving instructions of Islam.” Often, he said, the “crime” is no more than wearing Western clothes or not wearing a head scarf. Before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, Iraqi women had had rights enshrined in the country’s constitution since 1959 that were among the broadest of any Arab or Islamic nation…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36983

“They shoot us like goats, like birds, like animals”
Prof. Marc W. Herold, The Afghan Victim Memorial Project
…on Tuesday morning, October 2, 2007 in downtown Kandahar outside the governor’s palace. A man, 19, driving his motorcycle with his 12-yr-old brother behind approached a Canadian occupation re-supply convoy heading for the Canadian FOB Ma’Sum Ghar. The Canadian occupation forces opened fire killing Esmatullah and severely injuring Ahmad in the head (photo by Dene Moore, Canadian Press). At Esmatullah’s funeral held before dusk of this day, one of the boys’ uncles, Haji Muhammad Eisah told Can West News (not the Associated Press which showed no interest). Whenever they think they want to shoot somebody they can. Nobody can ask anything about it…that’s why they shoot us like goats, like birds, like animals… We don’t expect them to kill our people, those Canadians, Americans and foreign people. It would be good if they left our country.”…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36968

Abu Sitta warns Abbas against recognizing Israel as national state for Jews
Palestinian Information Center
Salman Abu Sitta, the general-coordinator of the Right of Return conference, has sternly warned Saturday PA chief Mahmoud Abbas not to fall in the Israeli “trap” by recognizing occupied Palestine as national state for Jews. In a written message he sent to Abbas and a copy of which was furnished to Saleem Al-Zanoun, the head of the PLO’s national council, Abu Sitta explained that the Israelis were trying to get this new form of recognition of their state in a bid push Abbas to concede as many Palestinian national rights as they could, not least the right of return. He explained that the Israeli officials were striving hard to convince Abbas to accept the Hebrew state, which was established on 78% of usurped Palestinian lands as “national state for the world’s Jews”, describing such acceptance, if it takes place, as disastrous to the decades-long Palestinian national struggle…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36981

Iraq’s Surging Refugee Crisis: Four Million Iraqi Refugees Struggle to Survive in an Increasingly Hostile Region
David Enders, The Indypendent
Salam and Hanan’s sixth-month-old son Hamoudi will probably not grow up in Baghdad. He will have lots of company. Salam* and Hanan are two of the approximately two million Iraqi refugees living in Syria and Jordan. They left Baghdad in June after their house was raided by militiamen because Salam worked as an accountant for the Iraqi government inside the green zone. He decided to take a leave from his job after that, but it seems unlikely he will return. He was also threatened by members of a political party inside the Iraqi government after filing a report that implicated members of the party of embezzlement and corruption. Their savings are running out, but Hanan and Hamoudi will try and stay in Damascus even if Salam decides to return. The lights suddenly go out in their small apartment…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36972

Brass in Pocket: A Chronicle of Blood Money Foretold
Chris Floyd , Empire Burlesque
While looking through the files to find a piece I’d done years back on some of the sleazy business dealings of Bush Regime honchos, I ran across the article below. It was a Moscow Times column that I wrote about Bushist war profiteering in Iraq. Pretty standard fare, you might think – after all, it is now a truth universally acknowledged that the Bush Administration’s rapine of Iraq is one of the most gargantuan corruption schemes in human history – but then I noticed the date of the column: October 4, 2002: six months before the first bombs fell…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36971

Shia Loves You (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah)
Jonathan Cutler
…With the singular exception of Elliott Abrams at NSC and John Hannah in Cheney’s office, all the major Right Zionists have now departed from service within the Bush administration. Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Bolton, Wurmser, etc. You would think they would all be demoralized. And maybe they do feel marginalized and ostracized in Washington. But they seem increasingly satisfied with a vicarious victory in Iraq (…) Now there is every reason to believe that they feel they have lost much of the war for Washington but have won (in absentia) the war for a Shiite Iraq. If some Right Zionists had reservations about Shiite power (i.e., the anti-Americanism of Moqtada al-Sadr), these appear to be dissipating. Gerecht was, undoubtedly, the first to “choose Sadr” when confronted with the choice between Shiite militias and the Sunni insurgency. But, as Gerecht pointed out in his most recent essay, he is not alone. There is also the British essayist, Bartle Bull, who has rehabilitated the “Mission Accomplished” claim and has learned to love Moqtada al-Sadr…And there are other Right Zionists, some more obscure than others, who welcome Shiite power and retain a deep hostility toward Sunni Arab Iraq…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36980

DESMOND TUTU WILL NOT BE SILENCED
Desert Peace
Despite attempts by the Israeli government (by banning him from Israel) and the Kosher Nostra (by getting him banned from the University of St. Thomas), Desmond Tutu will continue to speak out against the apartheid regime in Israel. His voice will not be silenced. The ‘reason’ given for banning him from St. Thomas is supposedly the text of THIS speech he gave in 2002… Next month he will be the featured speaker at a conference organised by SABEEL, in Boston…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36978

The Erosion of a Murder Case Against Marines in the Killing of 24 Iraqi Civilians
Paul von Zielbauer, The New York Times
Last year, when accounts of the killing of 24 Iraqis in Haditha by a group of marines came to light, it seemed that the Iraq war had produced its defining atrocity, just as the conflict in Vietnam had spawned the My Lai massacre a generation ago. But on Thursday, a senior military investigator recommended dropping murder charges against the ranking enlisted marine accused in the 2005 killings, just as he had done earlier in the cases of two other marines charged in the case. The recommendation may well have ended prosecutors’ chances of winning any murder convictions in the killings of the apparently unarmed men, women and children. In the recent case, against Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, the investigator recommended that he be charged with negligent homicide if the case moved ahead to court-martial. In the other two cases, the investigator recommended dropping all charges…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36976

Iraqi-sourced cholera cases rise in Iran
AFP
The number of cholera cases in Iran is on the rise after the outbreak of an epidemic in neighbouring Iraq, an Iranian health official was quoted as saying on Saturday. “The last count shows 43 people have contracted cholera in Kordestan province,” Mohsen Zahrai, who is in charge of water and food-borne diseases, told ISNA news agency. He said those affected had been commuting across the border with Iraq and warned Iranian citizens to postpone pilgrimages to Iraq until the situation was under control…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36975

GI Special 5J4: Morning Dies [ October 6, 2007 ]
Thomas F. Barton
Absurd mock men
Content in their suppressed gray garb
Suppressed in their minds
What an obscure picture of free will
Smug, big business
Fat on the souls
of the less fortunate
Wealthy grotesque, oblivious
Atrocities of epic nature
[…]

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36985

Parallel lives
Dalia Karpel, Haaretz
…After her army service she attended the Hebrew University and spent seven years investigating the processes that led Israeli soldiers to maltreat Palestinians in the first intifada, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her study, which she conducted as her master’s thesis in clinical psychology, focused on soldiers’ testimonies about acts of violence in which they had participated. The thesis was adapted as an article that appears in the current issue of the journal Alpayim, coauthored by her thesis adviser, Prof. Yoel Elizur. The article, titled “How can a situation happen?”, disguises the names of the soldiers involved, as well as times and places, in order to protect the interviewees, who were chosen as a sample from two armored infantry companies that did long service in Rafah. In an article of response, the writer David Grossman remarks that this is not a story of individuals but of hundreds and thousands “who carried out a kind of ‘privatization’ of a vast and general evil.”

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36982

AMSI Secretary General Sheikh Dr. Harith Al-Dhari has condemned last Friday the American project to divide Iraq…
HAQ agency- reports
AMSI Secretary General Sheikh Dr. Harith Al-Dhari has condemned last Friday the American project to divide Iraq. Meanwhile His Eminence also called all Iraqis to reject such project with all possible ways. In his interview with Rafedain Broadcast he emphasized that the time of issuing such project by the American Congress has came to cover the American failure in Iraq and indeed this decision was prepared before. He added that this decision was one of the four aims which drive the American forces to occupy Iraq (occupation of Iraq, dissolve the Iraqi army, dividing Iraq – the recent ugly decision – and conquering the possibilities of this country – a special legislation of petroleum law was issued requiring from current government and its parliament to practice it…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36969

Hard times fall on storied West Bank city
More than 130,000 residents of Nablus remain under Israeli siege as economical situation worsens.
Middle East Online
A walk through the ancient streets of the West Bank City of Nablus offers a rare glimpse into the Asiatic opulence that once adorned cities across the caravan routes of the Middle East. But what was once a major Palestinian tourist and commercial centre has since the outbreak of the intifada in 2000 wilted in the face of checkpoints and near-daily Israeli military incursions. “They call this the economic capital of Palestine but these days it is the capital of the unemployed,” says Bilal Hamouda, a merchant in the ancient quarter. Having seen some of the uprising’s fiercest battles, the Old City of Nablus has been transformed into a crude memorial to local fighters, its limestone walls covered with blast stains, militia graffiti and martyrs’ posters…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36963

New U.S. military leaders question Iraq mission
Nancy A. Youssef and Renee Schoof, McClatchy Newspapers
…Skelton, the House Armed Services Committee chairman, said that in the past he felt as if no one was listening when he warned the administration about the strain on the military. Now, he noted, former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker in January and the current chief, Gen. George Casey , testifying last week, have expressed concerns about the Army’s readiness. “The parallels are alarming,” Skelton said. “We cannot risk breaking the Army again. My real worry is that we have a choice between two losses or one loss. We’re not putting enough effort into Afghanistan , and I’m deeply concerned about that.”…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36962

Iraq rejects testimony by former anti-graft chief
Reuters
Iraq rejected on Saturday testimony by the former head of the country’s anti-corruption commission who said Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki protected some corrupt relatives from the investigative body. “The testimony by … Radhi al-Radhi in front of members of (U.S.) Congress is nothing more than false allegations … that serves known sides and figures who are systematically attempting to harm Prime Minister Nuri Kamil al-Maliki’s reputation,” a statement from Maliki’s office said. Radhi, who left Iraq in August after threats against him, told U.S. lawmakers on Thursday that 31 employees at the Iraqi Independent Integrity Commission were killed because of their jobs and that the government lost $18 billion through corruption…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36979

War News for Saturday, October 06, 2007
Iraq today
MNF-Iraq is reporting the death of a Multi-National Corps – Iraq soldier in a roadside bombing near Bayji in Salah ad Din Province on Friday, October 5th. Three other soldiers were wounded in the attack. MNF-Iraq is also reporting the deaths of two Multi-National Division – Baghdad soldiers in an improvised explosive device attack in a southeastern neighborhood of Baghdad on Friday, October 5th. Two other soldiers were wounded in the incident. The DoD has announced a new death, not previously reported by CENTCOM: U.S. Navy Seaman Apprentice Shayna Ann Schnell, 19, of Tell City, Indiana. The DoD release did not give a date or place of death. However, The Perry County (Indiana) News is running an article that provides more details. Schnell was apparently assigned to security as a master-at-arms at the port of Jebel Ali in the United Arab Emirates, but was visiting the city of Dubai on September 24th when she was involved in a vehicle accident. The taxi she was in blew a tire, causing the vehicle to crash into a brick wall, which then collapsed on the car. Schnell suffered severe brain injuries. Her father, stepmother, her sister and two brothers all flew to Dubai when they received word and were with her when she died on Monday morning, October 1st. Schnell had enlisted in the Navy straight out of high school in 2006…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36984

Cholera outbreak adds to misery in Iraq
Fatih Abdulsalam, Azzaman
Cholera is spreading quickly in Iraq and the number of cases and deaths is rising alarmingly. This contagious disease coincides with a host of other tragedies afflicting Iraqis. Health ministry officials say they are certain the disease will keep spreading in the coming two months unless the government takes drastic measures to contain it. But the steps the government has taken so far can only be described as hopeless, falling far short of the extent of the tragedy. One official whose name we keep hidden was even not ashamed to announce that the country lacks necessary chlorine to purify drinking water. “We are in need of 150 million chlorine tablets to purify water until the end of this wear but we do not have that many,” the official said. It is so simple and easy for this government to declare its innocence. It thinks Iraqis are naïve and can believe its story. As we wait for the pills the devastating disease might have afflicted and killed thousands of Iraqis. And where? In a country which is occupied and administered by the world’s most powerful state with a claim to human rights, democracy and transparency. We realized that the ministry of health was for a long time something like a butchery run by murderous militias. But we thought that situation had ended with the flight of its minister to the U.S. It seems little has changed since then…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36948

Why is Antiwar.com hiding the Iraq Genocide?
* * * UPDATE – ANTIWAR.COM’S REPLY: “What a jerk you are… In spite of your being such an asshole… Piss off.” * * *
Gabriele Zamparini
… I read on Antiwar.com that you edit the website’s page Casualties in Iraq – The Human Cost of Occupation …While that page includes a big Iraq Body Count’s banner and other IBC references, I could not find any mention of * the studies conducted by the world leaders in the field of epidemiology and published as peer-reviewed scientific papers in the world’s leading medical journal, the Lancet; * the recently published ORB poll suggesting a total of 1,220,580 deaths as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (ie as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)I know other people wrote you on the same issue in these years and again in these weeks and days. Again, Antiwar.com has not replied to anybody. Why is AntiWar.com – on its page Casualties in Iraq – The Human Cost of Occupation – hiding to its readers the Iraq Genocide? Thank you for your time and please, I would like to hear from you this time. (…) REPLY FROM ERIC GARRIS, Webmaster/Managing Editor Antiwar.com What a jerk you are. Rather than making a suggestion, you have to make accusations. I have never heard of the study you mention. In spite of your being such an asshole, I will take a look (…) But don’t worry about us ignoring your emails in the future. I will be blocking your slanderous rants so I don’t even h! ave to t hink about them.and again… And you appear to be quite the coward as well. Make sure you block all further critical comments, that way you can rewrite history just like your mentor (GW Bush)…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36943

Mansi: Closure of Ibrahimi Mosque prelude to convert it into synagogue
Palestinian Information Center
Dr. Yousef Mansi, the minister of Awkaf (endowments) in the PA caretaker government, has warned that the repeated closure of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Al-Khalil at the hands of the IOA posed as a prelude to convert the Islamic shrine into a Jewish synagogue. He said in a press release on Saturday that the IOA measures aimed at obstructing the arrival of Muslim worshipers to the Ibrahimi Mosque were in preparation for converting it into a Jewish synagogue. The Ibrahimi Mosque is wholly Muslim and Jews had nothing to do with it, the minister said, affirming that all IOA measures in this regard were null and void…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36960

United, and one like the fingers of one hand, we shall stand to wreck the Zionist – Crusaders conspiracy to tear away Iraq*
Al-moharer.net
We, writers, journalists, educated, medical doctors and engineers, laborers and farmers, professors and militaries and from every parts of Iraq, and who belong to all the religions and ethnies of Iraq, we call upon our people and families in, every corners of Iraq and all its religious and ethnies prism, to join us, utterly decry, denounce, condemn and absolutely reject the US’ Congress’ resolution to dismantle Iraq into three statelets prone to be nothing in the international arena but a chess board, encouraging, because of their weakness and impotency every kind of foreign interference, and deforming the personality and the humanity of the Iraqi human being who participated throughout history to build and set the world civilization… Ur, Warka, Babylon and Nineveh are witnesses that Iraq was the master of the world, a generous source for scientific and knowledge since thousands of years, and long before people even heard of the Cowboys’ US who fled their countries of origins in search for riches, escape legal pursuit or flee their pariah conditions…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36959

The U.S. War on Children
Sarah Meyer, Index Research
This research is about violence to children in the United States within the last month, with examples given for various states. The Bush veto was, for me, an appalling additional violence. Children must not be victims in any country…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36946

Enhanced Interrogation Methods? No, The Word Is “Torture”
Bob Higgins
I am sick to death of all the pussyfooting around the subject that has occupied the media for the duration of this premeditated, illegal war of terror that we the people of the United States have allowed to be waged against the people of Iraq, in our name, for the last several years. No matter how much lipstick and rouge we smear on the face of this war no matter how we attempt to dress up the evil and bestial acts that have been performed in its unholy name, it still has the hideous countenance of an evil swine from hell…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36949

Projects to Cover the Failures
al-Basair/ Editorial – AMSI
As the American War Administration has started its aggressive war on Iraq with lies and intimidation proposals over the American propaganda means, similar method is started again by proposal of dividing Iraq, as if Iraq is being one of America’s sacrificed country. The voters did not care to the decision more than the volume of the disaster caused by the ridiculous politics and great pride of thinking that they are world’s giant politicians. But the hero Iraqi resistance gave a great damages and lose to the occupation forces. The Iraqi nation represented by the powers of rejecting the occupation could conquer the occupation project in Iraq. However the stupid prideness of the leading group in USA whom are searching for a spot of light to attract attentions in case to turn them away of the big disaster that they had in Iraq, from such reason the decision of dividing Iraq has came along which was rejected regionally (Arabs) and internationally as well as condemnation of all power groups that America looks after and other groups of powers that rejects the control of one polarity to issue such internationally decision alone…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36958

“Family Guy” sued for anti-Semitic lyrics; no one dare sue MEMRI for anti-Palestinian lies
Sabbah’s blog
So here we go again: In the 67 years since its debut, “When You Wish Upon a Star” has been recorded by more than 100 artists and orchestras. But the song’s owner is irate about what it calls an unseemly spoof of the familiar tune, saying the dreamy classic was twisted into an anti-Semitic ballad and widely distributed as part of a comedy television program. (…) According to the lawsuit, Fox initially withheld the episode from distribution because of its content but eventually earned large sums of money by distributing more than 1 million copies of it to the public in various home video formats… Here is a background about this. According to Wikipedia, some FOX network executives claimed that they are ‘concerned’ that the episode could be construed as anti-Semitic, and made the decision not to air the episode, yet they sold one million copies and aired it on Cartoon Network before it aired on FOX. Now, knowing who is FOX and what is there agenda and it’s pro-Zionist history, doesn’t it sound that these guys planed the show to make this huge money out of it, despite that they knew it might get them in trouble -although I don’t see why it should? Someone might put this in the “conspiracy theory” list, but just compare this silly news propaganda to the MEMRI “breaking news” scandal and lies about Hamas TV’s Micky Mouse in which they translated MEMRI translated “The Jews are killing us” to “We will annihilate the Jews.” The lies of MEMR! I were p icked up by all major news organizations around the world and provided a skewed reports showing a very narrow view of the Israeli-Palestinian issue, without doing more than to further demonize Palestinians and Islam…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36957

3 U.S. troops killed in Iraq bombings
Tina Susman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
Roadside bombs killed three American soldiers Friday, and U.S. and Iraqi forces differed in their accounts of an overnight raid on a suspected hide-out for Shiite Muslim militiamen. The U.S. military said American forces backed by attack aircraft killed 25 militiamen in the assault on the village of Jizan Imam, about 40 miles northwest of Baghdad. Some Iraqi officials, though, said most of the dead were civilians mistaken for hostile forces. The U.S. troop deaths brought to at least 3,813 the number of American forces killed in Iraq since the war began in March 2003, according to icasualties.org…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36956

Al-Hakim, Al-Sadr sign landmark deal on joint action
Mohammad Al-Ghazi , KUNA
The two Shiite leaders Abdelaziz Al-Hakim and Moqtada Al-Sadr have signed a landmark deal on cementing the relations between their two major trends in southern and central Iraq and forming a joint committee. The deal between Al-Hakim – the leader of the United Iraqi Alliance, and Al-Sadr – the leader of the Sadrist Trend, is uncovered one month following the bloody incidents in Karbalaa city during the Shaabaniya ceremonies, a major Shiite feast (…) Under the deal, the two trends will mobilize their cultural and information resources to cement understanding, rapprochement and amity between their followers…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36955

GI Special 5J3: KIA Lies [ October 6, 2007 ]
Thomas F. Barton
10.1 Reuters : “The U.S. military death toll in September was also the lowest monthly total this year, with 62 killed according to the Web site icasualties.org, which tracks military deaths in Iraq.”
US KIA:
9-2007 66 KIA DOWN 8.4% from 2006 KIA. Repeat: 8.4%
9-2007 66 KIA UP 34.6% from 2005 KIA
[9-2006 72 KIA]
[9-2005 49 KIA]

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36953

An e-mail from Dr. Gideon Polya RE: Antiwar.com
Gabriele Zamparini, The Cat’s Dream
I have received the following e-mail from Dr. Gideon Polya Dear Gabriele, I have been writing in vain to Antiwar.com for years but they still insist on grossly under-reporting Iraq War Indigenous Iraqi deaths. Please feel free to re-publish, disseminate my 5 October 2007 letter to Antiwar.com below. Best regards, Gideon Polya (…) The total death toll in the Bush Asian Wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon) now totals 8 million (EIGHT MILLION). You have been informed (AGAIN, I have been writing in vain to Anti-War.com for years; I have just published a huge, scholarly book on this subject: “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950", G.M. Polya. Melbourne, 2007. If Anti-war.com now fails to report the ACTUAL violent and non-violent post-invasion deaths then it is KNOWINGLY complicit in holocaust denial…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36952

Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Friday, 5 October 2007.
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. www.freearabvoice.org
In a dispatch posted at 3:37pm Baghdad time Friday afternoon, the Association of Muslim Scholars of Iraq (AMSI) reported that US helicopters attacked the village of Jizan al-Imam west of Ba’qubah, 65km northeast of Baghdad, killing 25 villagers in the pre-dawn hours of Friday. The AMSI reported eyewitnesses as saying that US helicopters came and attacked the village at about 2am Friday morning. They said that 25 bodies of men and women were still buried under the rubble at the time of reporting and that about 40 more villagers were wounded by the American air strike. The US military admitted the attack but tried to justify it by saying that they believed that an individual linked to the al-Quds Brigades of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards was in the village. The contradictory American statement also said that a member of the Iraqi Resistance was a target in their attack on the village…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36954

Iraq Struggles With Cholera Outbreak
KATARINA KRATOVAC, The Associated Press
… WHO has confirmed at least 3,315 cholera cases and registered more than 30,000 cases of acute watery diarrhea _ which could also prove to be cholera in its more common, milder form. The group has also warned that _ as the weather cools and temperatures become more favorable for transmission _ the bacteria could spread further (…) Cholera, usually spread by drinking contaminated water, typically causes severe diarrhea that in extreme cases can lead to fatal dehydration and kidney failure. There are normally about 30 cases registered each year in Iraq. The last major outbreak was in 1999, when 20 cases were discovered in one day…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36937

Seven years on
Khaled Amayreh, Al-Ahram Weekly
“We didn’t just start the Intifada for the sake of it,” said Sami, the young Islamic student activist from Hebron, in the southern West Bank. He and a group of young college students were discussing the pluses and minuses of the Al-Aqsa uprising which this week entered its eighth year. “We were pushed and forced to rise up against our oppressors and tormentors because the alternative was and continues to be national annihilation,” Sami added, accentuating his words, as if he wanted to persuade colleagues of the rightness of his convictions. “But the Intifada has been a human, political and economic disaster for our people,” retorted Anwar, his colleague and classmate, nearly of the same age…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36951

Top cleric asks Iraqis not to join anti-Qaeda fight
Reuters
A top Iraqi Sunni cleric urged Iraqis on Friday not to join U.S.-led forces in fighting al Qaeda, saying they would be helping occupiers against compatriots. “We reject the actions of al Qaeda but they are still part of us … Ninety percent of al Qaeda are Iraqis,” Sheikh Harith al-Dari told Al Jazeera television. “It may be possible to hold a dialogue with them … and God may help them return to reason.” “From a national, Islamic and rational point of view, it is not allowed to fight alongside occupation forces,” said Dari, who heads Iraq’s Muslim Clerics Association. But Dari, whose association groups Iraq’s Sunni religious leaders, said self-defence against any al Qaeda attacks was justified…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36961

Archbishop: Iraq far worse than acknowledged
Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has launched a renewed attack on the war in Iraq and called for “urgent attention” to stabilise the country. Dr Williams, speaking after a visit to Syria last week, said the “terrible damage” wreaked on the region by the war in Iraq was far worse than had so far been acknowledged. Dr Williams’ comments, in an interview with the BBC, came after he met Iraqi refugees in Syria, many of them still in fear for their lives. Only last month, a new survey claimed that up to 1.2m people might have died because of the conflict…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36950

“It Doesn’t Get Any Worse Than That, Ray”
Unmasking AIPAC
WILLIAM A. COOK, CounterPunch
VRay Suarez (PBS News Hour Reporter, October 2, 2007): “You’re saying that the national legislature of this country, rather than doing the will of the citizens of the United States, passed that Iran resolution, sanctioning the Republican Guard, because of the American-Israeli Political Action Committee?” Mike Gravel (Democratic Presidential Candidate): “Wait a second. They’ll (sic) be some information coming out about how this thing was drafted. So the answer is yes, the short answer. … This is what’s at stake with this resolution. And it’s the height of immorality, irresponsibility, and the United States Senate, with the Democrats in charge, voted for the passage of this resolution. It doesn’t get any worse than that, Ray.”…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36947

IRAQ-JORDAN: First death registered among refugees at border
IRIN News
A woman from a group of 193 Iranian-Kurd refugees who have been stranded at the border of Jordan and Iraq for the past two and a half years became the first fatality there after she died on 2 October as a result of a disease complication, according to refugees at the camp and international and local relief organisations. Jordanian doctors said that the victim, 46-year-old Sharkat Palani, suffered from diabetes and a psychiatric illness. She left behind 11 children, ranging in age from nine to 23, and a husband. They all live in the same refugee camp in what is referred to as “no man’s land”. “We asked the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] to help bring her back to the Jordanian Red Crescent [JRC] hospital in Amman where she was treated a month ago, but we were told they could not do it without the medical advice of a Jordanian doctor,” Khabat Mohammadi, acting spokesman for the Iranian-Kurd refugees, said (…) The Iranian-Kurd refugees arrived at the Iraq-Jordan border after fleeing al-Tash refugee camp in Iraq’s western Anbar governorate, following clashes there between insurgents and US forces in January 2005. After being denied entry to Jordan, they remained on the Iraqi side of the border in an area which UNHCR and its partners say is difficult to access because of insecurity…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36945

A putative peace
Khaled Amayreh, Al-Ahram Weekly
Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas has privately threatened to resign if the upcoming American- sponsored international peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland, ends in failure. According to sources within Abbas’s immediate circle, the Palestinian leader is increasingly worried that a fiasco at the much-heralded conference would undermine his credibility among Palestinians, including members of his own Fatah Party. Abass’s threat to resign has been widely reported, though it is unclear whether it is genuine or a bluff intended to signal to Washington and Tel Aviv that the PA is already fed up with Israel’s stalling tactics as well as with America’s refusal to exert meaningful pressure on Israel to end its 40-year-old occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36944

Weekly Report: On Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory No. 39/2007 (27 Sep. – 03 Oct. 2007)
A Special Issue on the 7th Anniversary of the al-Aqsa Intifada
PCHR – Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
This report coincides with the 7th anniversary of the eruption of the al-Aqsa Intifada, which broke out following the former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to al-Aqsa Mosque (the Holy Sanctuary) in occupied Jerusalem. Over the last 7 years, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have perpetrated grave breaches of international law, including war crimes, against Palestinian civilians, in a manner unprecedented since 1967. The international community has remained silent and the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 failed to meet their obligations to ensure respect for the Convention in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and provide protection for Palestinian civilians. The international silence has served to encourage the Israeli government and its occupation forces to perpetrate more war crimes with impunity against Palestinian civilians. Over the past 7 years, IOF have employed its full-fledged arsenal against Palestinian civilians and property in the OPT. IOF have also attacked medical crews and journalists and killed and wounded a number of them. PCHR believes that the international failure to punish Israeli war criminals to apply the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 1949 in the OPT is a form! of perm ission for more killings…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=36936