IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE
Malcom Lagauche
In my last column, I spoke of seven Iraqi Ba’ath officials who have either been hanged or are on the verge of being murdered by the quisling government in Iraq: Saddam Hussein, Barazan al-Tikriti, Awad Hammad Bandar al-Saadoun, Taha Ramadan, Ali Hassan al-Majeed, Sultan Hashim Ahmad, and Hussein Rasheed al-Tikriti. Most U.S. citizens do not recognize the names of any of the martyrs except for Saddam Hussein. To them, these are a bunch of Arabs who got just what they deserved. Politicians of the Republican and Democrat parties hailed the deaths of the Ba’ath officials. The Western-supplied propaganda and the truth of the lives of these individuals vary greatly. One must go back a little in history to realize the importance these leaders had on the Arab world. The Ba’ath movement was revolutionary. For the first time, a party represented ideals that had not been implemented in Arab countries….

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A Short Lesson…
Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues
…Now let’s see if you spot that one. “ U.S. working to stop Turkey from invading Iraq.” How does that strike you ? I know it’s difficult but think again, after all you guessed right about my typing away at some keyboard… Too difficult ? Ok, let me give you a simpler one. Iran to the U.S – stop meddling in Iraq. U.S. to Iran – stop meddling in Iraq. Is this one any simpler for you ? Nope? Elusive huh? Complicated equation ? No common sense ? Can’t figure out the logic ?..

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Basra under Mahdi Army control
Roads to Iraq
Aljazeera reported that Mahdi Army controlling Basra right now after heavy fights, that started since this morning, Basra governor and chief Basra police runway to an unknown place, Mahdi Army took 50 hostages from Iraqi police and army, no more details because Aljazeera reporter in Basra says there is a deliberate media blackout by the “Green Zone” government….

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Palestinian Primary School in Fasayil to be demolished on the 29th of November!
Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign,
On the Thursday, the 17th of October the Israeli Occupation Forces issued a demolition order for Fasayil’s primary school and yet another Palestinian family’s home in the village. Construction work requires a permit from the Occupation authorities but since the occupation of the West Bank in 1967 not one has been granted. The systematic ban on destruction is clearly aiming at driving out Palestinians of the Jordan Valley. According to the demolition order issued against the primary school the community has to dismantle the school within 40 days or to face the arrival of the Occupation’s bulldozer and a heavy fine for not respecting the construction ban….

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Why do people who know about corrupt mercenaries in Iraq keep “committing suicide”?
Corrente
That’s the question Frank Rich doesn’t ask today. Should he have? Rich gives two examples (and it would be interesting to know if there were more). Both are connected to Price’s Blackwater mercenaries. Col. Ted Westhusing, an Army scholar of military ethics who was an innocent witness to corruption, not a participant, when he died at age 44 of a gunshot wound to the head while working for Gen. David Petraeus training Iraqi security forces in Baghdad in 2005. He was at the time the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq…

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What is not being said about the Ketziot prison raid
International Solidarity Movement
On October 22nd, at two in the morning, Israeli prison guards from Ketziot prison in the Negev desert began searching the tents and belongings of Palestinian inmates. Searching prisoners’ tents in the middle of the night is a classic form of harassment; keeping people from sleeping. Some prisoners resisted the search due to the early hour and the army responded by throwing sounds grenades and shooting tear gas canisters into the tents of prisoners and at prisoners themselves. It has been reported in the news that between 30 and 250 inmates have been injured, and that the Israeli forces used ‘non-lethal’ methods to subdue the prisoners (…) The information that the Israeli military unit Nahashon have used only ‘non-lethal’ methods has also proved to be misleading, or to use another word, false. What has gone unreported in Israeli and international news is that one inmate, Mohammed Al-Ashkar, was shot in the head and died at Soroka Medical Center, in Israel…

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16 civilians killed, 14 wounded in U.S. shelling near Tikrit
Voices of Iraq
Sixteen civilians were killed and 14 others wounded when U.S. aircrafts bombed residential areas south of Tikrit, an official security source from Salah al-Din, said on Tuesday. “U.S. warplanes shelled residential areas in Degla neighborhood, 20 km south of Tikrit, on Tuesday morning, killing 16 civilians and injuring 14 others,” Captain Abdullah al-Isawi told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI). The wounded were taken to the Tikrit Educational Hospital…

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“Ever since…there are so many “poor” Iraqi women around…”
Imad Khadduri, Free Iraq
….”He needed say no more…I understood. Perfectly, understood. If there is one aspect of the Occupation that I detest most… If there is one consequence of the American Occupation that I loathe the most, it is that one… Of course, I hate all of its aspects, but this one is the hardest to swallow… That of seeing young and old Iraqi women, selling themselves… Never mind your Adam Smith theories of supply and demand. Never mind, your old adage of it being the oldest trade around. I simply don’t buy it. My question is thus, how many horizontal mustaches “sin frontera” did it take? Ok, let me try again. How many motherfuckers, Americans and various other nationalities did it take to turn our women into forced “prostitutes”? “…

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Jewish Glasnost Update: Zionist Panic!
Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan
Apropos my earlier piece arguing that the ferocious backlash by the Zionist right against Jewish critics of Israel — also targeting as ‘anti-semitic’ those like Archbishop Desomand Tutu who seek to judge Israel by universal moral standards — is a sign of panic over losing their claim to a monopoly on representing Jews, evidence is growing that they are increasingly aware of their own predicament. One reader (thanks, Sasha!) pointed out this glum editorial by arch-Zionist and neocon Daniel Pipes, warning that even if it overcomes all the mortal threats that neocons like to see all around Israel, that won’t help it cope with what he calls Israel’s ultimate challenge — “a Jewish population increasingly disenchanted with, even embarrassed by, the country’s founding ideology, Zionism, the Jewish national movement.” (Actually, Daniel, I’d call it the Jewish nationalist movement, but let’s not quibble here.) It’s worth quoting at lenght from Pipes’ piece…

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Rain of terror in the U.S. air war in Iraq
Chris Floyd , Salon
Monday, the Pentagon acknowledged a long-unspoken truth: that the bombardment of civilian neighborhoods in Iraq is an integral part of the vaunted “counterinsurgency” doctrine of Gen. David Petraeus. The number of airstrikes in the conquered land has risen fivefold since George W. Bush escalated the war in January, as USA Today reports: “Coalition forces launched 1,140 airstrikes in the first nine months of this year compared with 229 in all of last year, according to military statistics … In Iraq, the temporary increase of 30,000 U.S. troops ordered by President Bush in January has led to the increase in bombing missions. The U.S. command has moved forces off large bases and into neighborhoods and has launched several large offensives aimed at al-Qaeda … ‘You end up having that many more opportunities for close air support,’ said Air Force Brig. Gen. Stephen Mueller, director of the Combined Air Operations Center in Doha, Qatar.” …

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Nafha accuses Negev wardens of using forbidden weapons against prisoners
Palestinian Information Center
The Nafha society for the defense of prisoners and human rights strongly denounced the Israeli Negev prison administration for storming and attacking the prison sections at dawn Monday using internationally forbidden weapons against the Palestinian prisoners, considering it a dangerous step flouting all international laws and conventions on human rights. Nafha also accused Israeli prison administrations of racism and Nazism, where they use the Palestinian prisoners every once in a while as guinea pigs to test the affectivity of their suppressive weapons, pointing out that every Palestinian prisoner gets in Israeli jails is vulnerable to different assaults….

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U.N. challenges U.S. on illegal air strikes in Iraq
Nicolas J. S. Davies, Online Journal Contributing Writer
Just as U.S. air operations over Iraq have reached their highest level since the destruction of Fallujah in November 2004, with as many as 70 close air support missions flown on many days since October 1, a new Human Rights Report published by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq has challenged the United States to stop killing civilians in illegal air strikes. The Human Rights Report for the second quarter of 2007 was long overdue, and was finally published on October 11. The report explains that it was modified following discussions with U.S. and Iraqi occupation authorities, and this appears to account for the long delay in its publication….

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PM Erdo?an to press Olmert to give up supporting Iraqi Kurds
Today’s Zaman
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an will bring the issue of Israeli experts’ training of military forces in the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq to the agenda in his talks with his Israeli counterpart, Ehud Olmert, scheduled to take place today in the British capital. A spokesperson for Olmert, who arrived in Paris on Sunday, announced on Monday that he will meet with Erdo?an today in London. Erdo?an departed yesterday from Ankara for London for an official visit during which he will also have talks with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown….

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Crisis over Turkish Kurdish guerrillas is part of U.S. agenda
Fatih Abdulsalam, Azzaman
The remote and inaccessible mountains in Turkey, Iran and Iraq have never been the exclusive territory of one state. These are dark and difficult mountains where anyone can hide but no government or force can find. Therefore, the transfer of Turkish Kurdish guerrillas to one of Iraq’s mountains does not mean that the nearly 30-year old Turkish crisis has immediately become an Iraqi issue, with its consequences boomeranging on the conditions in the country as a whole…

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Clinical death of Palestinian prisoner officially announced
Palestinian Information Center
The clinical death of prisoner Mohamed Al-Ashqar was officially announced in the Soroka hospital in Beersheba on Monday evening where he was transferred after sustaining serious wounds during the aggression committed by the Israeli Negev prison’s police backed up by Israeli special riot unit called “Nahshon” against Palestinian prisoners. For his part, director of the prisoners’ studies center Ra’fat Hamdona revealed that an Israeli bullet had penetrated Ashqar’s forehead leading to his clinical death, pointing out that the Israeli policemen brutally handcuffed the victim while being on a hospital bed and tried to bar his mother from visiting him, but later she was allowed to have a look at him for only five minutes after the Red Cross intervened….

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US airstrike in Iraq kills 11, including civilians
Aseel Kami, Reuters
The U.S. military said it killed 11 people in a helicopter attack on a group of men seen planting a roadside bomb north of Baghdad on Tuesday, but police and residents said the dead were farmers, women and children. The U.S. military acknowledged that six of those killed were civilians and said it regretted their deaths, but it blamed militants for using civilians as a shield. The air strike was the third resulting in civilian deaths in two weeks and comes as the U.S. military’s reliance on airpower to target militants is under increased scrutiny from the Iraqi government and the United Nations mission in Iraq….

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Israel Does Not Want Eyewitnesses of Its Crimes in the Gaza Strip
A Spanish Solidarity Delegation Denies Entry into the Gaza Strip
PCHR – Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
On Sunday, 21 October 2007, Israeli occupation authorities prevented a Spanish delegation from the Andalusia from entering the Gaza Strip through Beit Hanoun (Erez) crossing for no apparent reason, although members of the delegation were informed by the Spanish Consul-General in Jerusalem that the coordination for their entry into the Gaza Strip was completed. According to information available to PCHR from members of the Spanish Delegation, they arrived at Beit Hanoun (Erez) crossing at approximately 11:00 coming form Jordan….

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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Monday, 22 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 12:04pm Baghdad time Monday afternoon, the Association of Muslim Scholars of Iraq (AMSI) reported that Iraqi Resistance fighters attacked a US patrol north of the town of ar-Rutbah in western Iraq near the Jordanian border, at dawn Monday. The AMSI reported a n official in the al-Anbar Province puppet police who asked not to be identified as saying that the two bombs went off by the American patrol and then the Resistance fighters opened fire on them with rockets. The attack left one US soldier dead and four more of them wounded…

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Jihad and Reform Front: Statement regarding possible Turkish military intervention n
Jihad and Reform Front
Jihad and Reform Front monitor with great concern what is going on our beloved North, thou Iraq has become an open arena for each player, and a fertility ground for all invaders, and a scene for serious events, and secure shelter for every devil, and the agreement of war criminals on dividing Iraq became imminent, to make it a better place to liquidate the external consideration on its territory.
At the time Sunnis are being displaced from their towns and killed in center and south Iraq, visas and residence cards is being imposed against them in the north with unfairly and harsh conditions, and in the same time it is a haven for the Kurdish Workers Party, which attacks Turkey, and then to start the new scene of a Turkish military intervention….

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Bush Asks for $46 Billion More for Wars
DEB RIECHMANN, AP
President Bush asked Congress for $46 billion more to bankroll wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and said he wants the money approved by Christmas. The fighting in Iraq, in its fifth year, already has cost more than $455 billion. Democrats who gained control of Congress with an antiwar message said Bush should not expect lawmakers to rubber-stamp the request….

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Purported new bin Laden audio airs
CNN
Al-Jazeera broadcast Monday an audio message purportedly from al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden calling on al Qaeda and other groups in Iraq to unify their forces and speak with one voice, that of the Islamic nation. The Arabic-language broadcaster said the tape was titled “Letter to the People of Iraq.” The message includes no dated references, making it impossible to determine when it was taped based on its contents. In the message, bin Laden calls on his followers to be loyal to the Islamic nation, not to individual leaders, groups, tribes or countries….

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