“Come and see our over flowing morgues… Come and see the rubble of your surgical air-strikes”
Mike Whitney
….No one wants to live under occupation and all of the surveys conducted since the invasion in 2003 indicate that more than 90% of the Iraqi people want to see the United States withdrawal. Given these results, it is obvious why the resistance has mushroomed. There will always be a growing pool of young nationalists eager to join the fray. The US cannot prevail in Iraq nor can they impose a “political solution”, which is the other great myth currently in vogue. The only acceptable political solution to occupation is withdrawal – not puppet regimes, not “oil laws” not “benchmarks”. Withdrawal. PeriodBut Bush will not withdrawal and apparently no one can force him to do so. So, the killing will continue unabated behind the media’s iron curtain while the overall situation on the ground continues to deteriorate. Eventually, after years of ethnic cleansing, sectarian fighting and stepped-up military operations, the position of the US will become untenable and the troops will come home. But the cost in human terms will be enormous. Already one million Iraqis have been killed in the war and four million others have become refugees. Credit the US media for concealing the real savagery of foreign occupation and its effects on Iraqi society. The country is in ruins. There are only three problems in Iraq; occupation, occupation and occupation….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37502

Iraqi refugees turn to prostitution
OMAR SINAN, Associated Press Writer
The Iraqi women jump onto the stage at the al-Rawabi club, their long black hair swinging, their young faces caked with makeup. Iraqi pop music booms out as they sway and dance under strobe lights. Nearby, a woman nicknamed At’outa meets her paying dates — men who hand over $90 a night for companionship and sex. This club in northwest Damascus represents one of the most troubling aspects of the Iraqi refugee crisis — Iraqi women and girls who are turning to prostitution to survive in countries that have taken them in but won’t let them or their families work at most other jobs…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37509

Making Room for Florida Immigrants to Palestine
umkahlil
Israel murdered these two boys from Jenin on October 23 to make room for Jon Schwartz (photo second from bottom) of Florida and the other supremacist immigrants from North America pictured above. Indigenous Palestinians are caged, murdered, ethnically cleansed, starved and humiliated so that privileged Zionist Jews from all over the world may thrive on stolen property and come and play soldier. Tell me why 7.2 million Palestinian refugees should accept that any Jew from anywhere in the world who has never set foot in Palestine may become an automatic citizen when Palestinians are denied their universal right to return to their actual property and homes….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37511

US soldiers shy from battle in Iraq
Dahr Jamail
Iraq war veterans now stationed at a base here in upstate New York say that morale among US soldiers in the country is so poor, many are simply parking their Humvees and pretending to be on patrol, a practice dubbed “search and avoid” missions. Phil Aliff is an active duty soldier with the 10th Mountain Division stationed at Fort Drum. He served nearly one year in Iraq from August 2005 to July 2006, in the areas of Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, both west of Baghdad. “Morale was incredibly low,” said Aliff, adding that he joined the military because he was raised in a poor family by a single mother and had few other prospects. “Most men in my platoon in Iraq were just in from combat tours in Afghanistan.”…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37519

Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Wednesday, 24 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 12:32am Makkah time Thursday morning, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that the US military had admitted that an Iraqi Resistance land mine had exploded in Salah ad-Din Province on Wednesday. Mafkarat al-Islam reported a US communiqué as announcing that the Resistance attack killed one American occupation soldier and wounded three more of them. In keeping with the US policy of concealing facts regarding its losses in Iraq, the American statement failed to provide any further details, not even specifying where in the 24,751 square kilometers of Salah ad-Din Province the attack took place….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37518

“I have lost everything”
Margaret Aguirre, International Medical Corps (IMC)
I am in Jordan, where the U.N. estimates that 600,000 Iraqis have fled the violence in their homeland, streaming across the border in hopes of finding a safer existence. Many of them have leveraged everything they have to secure visas and get their families onto flights out of Iraq. By the time these refugees make their way to a major city like Amman, they have little money or economic prospects and limited access to health care. Most have also suffered the loss of a family member. Yesterday I toured health clinics in a low-income area of East Amman, where large numbers of Iraqis have settled and where International Medical Corps will be working to provide them with primary and mental health care services. Their stories are heartbreaking. Repeatedly I heard the same phrase: “I have lost everything.”….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37517

Wednesday: 2 GIs, 38 Iraqis Killed, 60 Wounded; Turks Kill 34 PKK Rebels in Iraq
Margaret Griffis, Antiwar.com
At least 38 Iraqis were killed and 60 were wounded in the latest violence. Also, 34 PKK rebels were killed when Turkish forces crossed the border into northern Iraq. Two American servicemembers were killed in separate incidents. During a mine explosion in Salah ad Din province, one MND-North soldier was killed and three were wounded. One MNC-I soldier was killed and five more were wounded during operations near Baiji…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37516

Israel plans to cut power to Gaza Strip
Saed Bannoura – IMEMC
In retaliation for the eighteen homemade shells fired Tuesday night by Palestinian resistance fighters toward Israel, which were themselves in retaliation for the Israeli assassination of a Palestinian resistance leader, Israeli authorities have threatened to cut power to the Gaza Strip. This type of ‘collective punishment’ against the entire population of 1.3 million Palestinians in Gaza is a violation of international law, and such actions carried out by Israel in the past have been widely condemned by international human rights groups. The Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai told Israeli Army Radio on Wednesday, “We plan to dramatically reduce the two-thirds of power that is supplied by Israel, which will take several weeks.”….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37515

Wars may cost $2.4 trillion over decade
ANNE FLAHERTY, Associated Press Writer
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost as much as $2.4 trillion through the next decade, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday. The White House brushed off the analysis as “speculation.” The estimate was the most comprehensive and far-reaching one to date. It factored in costs previously not counted and assumed that large number of forces would remain in the regions. According to analysis, the U.S. has spent about $604 billion on the wars, including $39 billion in diplomatic operations and foreign aid…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37512

Iran wins major infrastructure contract in Iraq
worldtribune.com
Iraq has awarded a vital infrastructure contract to Iran that could facilitate its military presence in a developoment that has alarmed the U.S. The Iraqi Electricity Ministry has selected companies from China and Iran to construct two power plants. The ministry said the awards totaled $1.1 billion and would reduce the constant power outages in Baghdad. The award to Iran for the construction of a 160-megawatt power plant in Baghdad’s Sadr City has alarmed the U.S. military in Iraq. Military sources said the U.S.-led coalition was concerned that Iran could use the $150 million project to significantly expand its intelligence and military presence in Iraq…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37508

Shin Bet prevented medical care to Palestinian cancer patient
Amira Hass, Haaretz Correspondent
The Shin Bet is refusing to allow a 21-year-old Rafiah man who is sick with cancer and in need of immediate medical care to come to Israel, even though he obtained permission from the Israeli Defense Forces’ Coordination and Liaison Administration. The Shin Bet also arrested the patient’s father, who accompanied him to the hospital. Mahmoud Abu Taha was diagnosed with cancer of the small intestine in August 2007. Treatment in Gaza was unsuccessful, and he lost a third of his body weight. In addition, he is not taking all of the vitamins he needs because of the shortage of medications in Gazan hospitals….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37505

Bipartisan Consensus: Iraq, Many More Years of War
Jack A. Smith, Global Research
After a few skirmishes, congressional Democrats have fled the field of battle with the Republicans over the matter of withdrawing some U.S. troops from Iraq. Ending the war itself was never a serious part of the several-month debate, although many Americans thought it was. A consensus seems to be building in Washington that views a long term U.S. military presence in Iraq as a valuable geostrategic asset in the quest for regional and global hegemony. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is now talking about an occupation of an unlimited number of years with a minimum of 40,000 U.S. troops. The Democratic Party and the majority of its politicians in Congress are expected to go along with this…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37504

A Conquered Continent: The True Relationship Between Europe and America
Chris Floyd , Empire Burlesque
…Anderson delves into the specifics of the U.S.-Europe relation today, and finds very little distance but a great deal of continuity – a continuity that helps explain what Anderson rightly calls the “surrender of Europe” to the United States. This is expressed most sharply in the actions (as opposed to rhetoric) of European governments in regard to Bush’s Terror War, where they have countenanced the war of aggression in Iraq and played a major role in the vile rendition program of Bush’s gulag….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37506

Israel kills two Palestinian boys in Gaza
Reuters
Israeli forces killed two Palestinian boys in the northern Gaza Strip on Wednesday, hospital officials in Gaza said. Hospital officials said the boys, aged 12 and 13, were in an area used by militants to fire rockets into southern Israel. Medics described them as civilians….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37507

A Palestinian Camp in Lebanon is Burned and Destroyed, the Media is Banned, and the World is Silent
What Happened in Nahr Al Bared?
MICHAEL BIRMINGHAM
Nahr Al Bared is a Palestinian refugee camp in the north of Lebanon which has been home to about 40,000 Palestinian people, most of whom are the children and grandchildren of those who left Palestine in 1948. Some like Abu Mohammad were born in Palestine. He was ten years old, and next year it will be sixty years since the formation of the State of Israel was achieved through the ethnic cleansing of Abu Mohammad and so many others from their home in Palestine. He told me this as the two of us sat alone in the pitch dark while rats ran around beside our chairs at his house. As I left he went in to sleep alone amongst ashes and rodents, with no neighbours around him, trying to believe that he still has something left to protect….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37503

General claims Bush gave ‘marching orders’ on aggressive interrogation at Guantanamo
Nick Juliano, Raw Story
More than 100,000 pages of newly released government documents demonstrate how US military interrogators “abused, tortured or killed” scores of prisoners rounded up since Sept. 11, 2001, including some who were not even suspected of having terrorist ties, according to a just-published book. In Administration of Torture, two American Civil Liberties Union attorneys detail the findings of a years-long investigation and court battle with the administration that resulted in the release of massive amounts of data on prisoner treatment and the deaths of US-held prisoners….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37499

Who is Telling the Truth?
The Guantánamo Suicides
ANDY WORTHINGTON
The grim story of the Guantánamo suicides—the deaths of three men, Ali al-Salami, Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani in June 2006, and another, Abdul Rahman al-Amri, in May this year—took another turn last week, when, in the absence of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service’s long-awaited report into the deaths, Navy Capt. Patrick McCarthy, the senior lawyer on Guantánamo’s management team, spoke out in an interview, declaring that all four men had killed themselves with “craftily fashioned nooses.”…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37498

Bush offers to bomb Kurds
Herald Sun
THE Bush Administration is considering air strikes, including cruise missiles, against the Kurdish rebel group PKK in northern Iraq. The move would be an attempt to stave off a Turkish invasion of that country to fight the rebels. President George Bush spoke with Turkish President Abdullah Gul by phone yesterday in an effort to ease the crisis….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37529

“They murdered him in cold blood”
From Khalid Amayreh in the West Bank
A Palestinian political prisoner who on Monday was shot in the head by an Israeli prison guard at the notorious desert detention camp, Kitziot, has died of his wounds. The prisoner is Muhammed Sati al Ashkar, of the village of Sida near Tulkarm and a father of a 2-year-old child. He had been sentenced to three and a half years for opposing the Israeli occupation. He was to be released from prison after three months. Al-Ashkar was shot by Israeli prison guards early Monday when so-called anti-riot police indiscriminately opened fire on prisoners who were peacefully protesting humiliating and provocative Israeli raids, including stripping inmates of their clothes and carrying out midnight searches and frisking, which prisoners say are intended to insult their dignity and sense of honor.

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37528

STOP CALLING ME A “DOOMER”
Carolyn Baker
…Participation in the federal election process sanctions the lie that authentic choices exist in presidential politics and condones the use of the election chimera for the purposes of maintaining social control. It is progressive America’s method of choice for maintaining the dirty little secret of the toxic system-that Daddy is raping the kids, but we can’t talk about it! If we do admit this to ourselves and each other, we will feel hopeless, angry, sad, disempowered-unless, we accept that all of this is the result of the collapse of civilization, and that the most powerful act for any of us is admitting that collapse is real and beginning as soon as possible our preparation for it. Overall, the Democratic progressive left refuses to acknowledge that not only do presidents and political parties not govern the United States, but they are in fact, irrelevant. The sovereignty of nations has been irreversibly eroded by corporatism and organizations such as the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission whose agenda is the dissolution of nation-states and the global dominance of corporations. Almost all of the candidates progressives tout as capable of reversing America’s descent into fascism are prominent members of one or more of these hegemonic organizations….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37514

Nato air raid ‘kills civilians’ near Kabul
BBC News
At least 13 Afghan civilians have been killed in a Nato air strike near Kabul, a provincial official says. Thirteen others were injured, the head of Wardak provincial council said. The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) confirmed it had bombed an “insurgent position” but said it had no evidence civilians died. Civilian deaths have risen as conflict in Afghanistan has worsened. It is often difficult to establish if claims of civilian casualties are accurate….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37530

SADDAM’S LAST WILL: UNITE IN THE RESISTANCE
“In His Final Will Saddam Addresses the Iraqi People…”
Diya Al-Samarra’i, Al Quds Al Arabi
“Al Quds Al Arabi has obtained a copy of a will written by late Iraqi President Saddam Husayn. According to an authorized source from the clan of the late president, the will was handed over together with other possessions to Saddam’s eldest daughter, Raghdah Saddam. (…)”O great Iraqi people, brave warriors in our striving armed forces, glorious Iraqi women, sons of our glorious nation, brave believers in our courageous resistance. I was as you have known me in the past. Now, God Almighty wants me to be again in the arena of jihad and struggle in the same way we were before the revolution, and even in a more severe ordeal. “O beloved people, this cruel situation in which we all are, and which afflicts the great Iraq, is a new lesson and a new calamity so that people of all descriptions learn it, and it becomes apparent before God and before the people at present and in the future, when our current condition becomes a glorious history….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37490

The Turks know
Xymphora
…Do you think it is a coincidence that Israel has been training the Kurds and that the Kurds suddenly took the opportunity of this provocation by Israeli agent Lantos to mount a big attack against the Turks in Turkey? The Kurds, egged on by the Israelis, want the Turks to attack Iraqi Kurdistan, as they see it as the only way to eventually lead to the breakup of Iraq and the creation of Greater Kurdistan. Obviously, this also suits the Israelis….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37486

Mercenaries Part of U.S. Plot to Destroy the Iraqi People …
Anas Zahid, Al Madina, Saudi Arabia – Translated By James Jacobson
…The conspiracy is enormous and it has many facets, but the main objective is the destruction of Iraqi rights … and when we talk of the destruction of rights, it doesn’t stop at murder, instability, poverty and the need to flee the country. This also includes denying and mutilating the identity of this people and changing their landmarks, which began with the theft of Iraqi antiquities just days after the occupation began. Indeed, we are confronting a very carefully laid out plan….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37476

Palestinian Prisoner Assassinated In Notorious Ktziot Jail in Beer Sheva
One Palestinian Prisoner Killed – 250 Injured
Hiyam Noir, PalestineFreeVoice
One Palestinian prisoner was killed – one Palestinian prisoner lost his eye and eight other Palestinian prisoners are suffering from various injuries, following the violent assault allegedly conducted by Israeli guards at the infamous Ktziot jail in Beet Sheva in the Negev desert. Muhammad Ashkar was killed in the attack. He was married and has a child.The family of Muhammad was able to visit him after he was critically wounded. Mohammads family found him handcuffed and chained by his feet’s to a stretcher. The mortally wounded Muhammad Ashkar was hit in the head with a bag filled with pellets when he was bending down after he was struck by lethal ammunition from Israeli fire arms. Mohammad Ashkar served a five-year sentence and had only two months left until his release. Ashkar’s brother was earlier released from an Israeli prison after he was paralyzed during his confinement,neglected and tortured by savage Israelis prison authorities….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37487

Suicide and Spin Doctors
H. Candace Gorman
Now that the U.S. military has “cleared” my notes, I can tell you about my July meeting at Guantánamo with my client Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi. Al-Ghizzawi was visibly shaken when I entered the meeting room and he immediately told me of his despair over the May death of a fellow inmate, a young Saudi man named Abdel Rahman Al Amri. Al-Ghizzawi knew that Amri had been suffering from Hepatitis B and tuberculosis, the same two conditions from which he himself suffers. Like al-Ghizzawi, Amri had not been treated for his illnesses. Al-Ghizzawi, now so sick he can barely walk, told me that Amri, too, had been ill and then, suddenly, he was dead….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37488

Drip-feeding Gaza
Kirstie Campbell, Guardian
The fridge of Hamoud al-Jalal is as bare as the spartan walls of his apartment. There are bottles of water, some tomatoes, aubergines, and bread in addition to medicine for his heart and kidney problems. With a diet of bread and fried vegetables, it’s no surprise that his wife, Attia, and at least two of their 12 children, are anaemic. Hamoud, who lives in the Sabra area of Gaza City, has been unemployed for five years and cannot work due to his illness. The family’s only source of income is the daily wage of 15 shekels ($4) earned by their 15-year-old son. They, like 252,000 people in Gaza, are completely reliant on monthly food handouts from the United Nations World Food Programme. The poverty of the Jalal family has become an increasing phenomenon in Gaza since June when the population’s food needs fell to the mercy of political tensions between Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and other militant groups. The right to food is recognised under the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37489

Gaza hospital affirms inability to provide services due to Israeli siege
Palestinian Information Center
A Palestinian hospital in Gaza specialized in providing services to patients with special needs has affirmed that the Israeli siege on Gaza and the closure of crossings had greatly affected its ability to provide those services. Al-Wafa’a hospital for medical rehabilitation and specialized surgeries said in a statement that the center’s services were obstructed and a number of them came to a complete halt due to lack of necessary medicines and other medical supplies. It said that the hospital administration was doing its best to provide the services despite those harsh circumstances, and noted that the staff did not receive salaries for the past five months…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37493

Report: Sixty-eight Palestinians imprisoned in their village
IMEMC
The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, B’tselem, issued a report Tuesday documenting the case of sixty-eight Palestinians, including twenty-six children, who are imprisoned in Tel ‘Adasa village in East Jerusalem. Israeli forces have constructed the Annexation wall along the village, separating the villagers from the town of Bir Nebala, where many of the adults are employed and all the children attend school….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37496

The Real ‘Gay Bomb’ of the Iraq War
Iraqi exile says his LGBT compatriots — now routinely rounded up and assassinated — were safer under Saddam
Bryan Ochalla
Everyone has had a chuckle over the non-lethal “gay bomb” the U.S. Air Force considered adding to its arsenal in the early ‘90s. Although the weapon never made it out of the planning stages, a gay bomb of another sort has been exploding in Iraq since the U.S. military invaded the country in 2003, according to Ali Hili, a 34-year-old Iraqi exile now living in London. “The U.S, and other allied forces are doing nothing to stop the massacres of any ordinary Iraqi, not to mention the homosexuals, the most unpopular portion of Iraqi society under the new evil regime,” says Hali, who launched Iraqi LGBT in late 2005 “after hearing about the killing of so many of my friends” inside the war-torn country. “Homosexuality was generally tolerated under Saddam,” Hali says. “There certainly was no danger of gay people being assassinated in the street by police. Since his overthrow, the violent persecution of gays and lesbians is commonplace. Life in Iraq now is hell for all LGBT people; no one can be openly gay and alive.”…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37494

Under the Shadow of the Big Neighbor
Bush’s Cuba Detour
TARIQ ALI
Bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, obsessed with Iran’s rise as a regional power (a direct result of the wars in the aforementioned countries) the State Department has woken up to the fact that South America is in turmoil. Their last major intervention in the region was a crude attempt to topple the democratically elected government in Venezuela. This was in 2002, a year before the adventure in Iraq. Since then a wave of Bolivarian unity has swept the continent, successful in Bolivia and Ecuador, creating ripples in Peru and Paraguay and, above all, breaking the long isolation of Cuba….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37495

“They murdered him in cold blood”
A Palestinian political prisoner who on Monday was shot in the head by an Israeli prison guard at the notorious desert detention camp, Kitziot, has died of his wounds. The prisoner is Muhammed Sati al Ashkar, of the village of Sida near Tulkarm and a father of a 2-year-old child. He had been sentenced to three and a half years for opposing the Israeli occupation. He was to be released from prison after three months. Al-Ashkar was shot by Israeli prison guards early Monday when so-called anti-riot police indiscriminately opened fire on prisoners who were peacefully protesting humiliating and provocative Israeli raids, including stripping inmates of their clothes and carrying out midnight searches and frisking, which prisoners say are intended to insult their dignity and sense of honor…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37483

Israel Violates Prisoner Treatment Convention
Kawther Salam
Israel violates the international convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. Mohammed Safi Muhammed Al-Ashkar, a Palestinian prisoner of age 29, was murdered today morning at 2 AM by an Israeli jailer, who shot him with dumdum bullets at the “Ansar 3/ Nafha” concentration camp south of Al-Nakab, also known as Ketziot. International laws forbid using dumdum ammunitions, which explode inside the victims bodies. Over 400 IDF soldiers from the Shimshon and Metsada special forces raided eight departments of Palestinian prisoners at Al-Nakab in a savage way, shooting live bullets, destroying and burning the prisoners property….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37477

Suspected Jewish terrorists set Jerusalem Church on fire
Palestinian Information Center
Suspected Jewish terrorists on Wednesday set a Baptist Church in West Jerusalem on fire, Police and eyewitnesses said. The interior of the church was badly damaged and religious artifacts including crucifixes and bibles were burned. The police said they suspected that arsonists threw flammable substance inside the church at night. The church is located not far from a Haredi (Jewish Orthodox) neighborhood and police suspect that extremist Haredis offended by the presence of the church in the area may have carried out the arson attack….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37485

“They murdered him in cold blood”
A Palestinian political prisoner who on Monday was shot in the head by an Israeli prison guard at the notorious desert detention camp, Kitziot, has died of his wounds. The prisoner is Muhammed Sati al Ashkar, of the village of Sida near Tulkarm and a father of a 2-year-old child. He had been sentenced to three and a half years for opposing the Israeli occupation. He was to be released from prison after three months. Al-Ashkar was shot by Israeli prison guards early Monday when so-called anti-riot police indiscriminately opened fire on prisoners who were peacefully protesting humiliating and provocative Israeli raids, including stripping inmates of their clothes and carrying out midnight searches and frisking, which prisoners say are intended to insult their dignity and sense of honor…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37483

Report: Most of $1.2 billion to train Iraqi police unaccounted for
CNN
The U.S. State Department is unable to account for most of $1.2 billion in funding that it gave to DynCorp International to train Iraqi police, a government report said Tuesday. An International Police Liaison Officer hired by DynCorp stands near new Iraqi police recruits in Falluja, Iraq. “The bottom line is that State can’t account for where it went,” said Glenn D. Furbish, who was involved in putting together the 20-page report for the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction (SIGIR)….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37491

Bush wars to cost 40 times higher than original estimates; $8,000 per man, woman child in US
Nick Juliano, Raw Story
The United States is spending about $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country to pursue wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to new estimates that show the wars will cost about $2.4 trillion over the next decade. More than one-fourth of the money spent in Iraq and Afghanistan — $705 billion — will go to paying interest on the wars’ costs, which are being funded with borrowed dollars, according to an estimate to be released Wednesday by the Congressional Budget Office….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37492

Correcting for the cut-and-paste version of the Bin Laden talk
Arablinks
It’s now clear that the brief taped material broadcast Monday by AlJazeera (the basis for the prior post here) was a cut-and-paste from a longer, 33-minute audio tape, which was released on the Internet by the AQ media arm Al-Sahab today, Tuesday, with English subtitles, along with a bitter complaint from Al-Sahab about the distortions in what AlJazeera presented on Monday. And it seems they have a point…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37482

Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Tuesday, 23 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 5:23pm Baghdad time Tuesday evening, the Association of Muslim Scholars of Iraq (AMSI) reported that fierce armed clashes took place in the Baghdad district of al-A’zamiyah at midday Tuesday as local residents battled puppet “Iraqi National Guard” troops. The AMSI reported that the battle erupted after two bombs exploded in the district. One went off near the an-Nu’man Hospital and the second on 20 Street. The puppet “National Guards” responded by ransacking shops in the areas where the bombs went off, breaking merchandise and shouting obscenities as local residents who finally took up arms against the puppet troops. No information on the nature or extent of casualties was available, however, because after the fighting began the entire area was sealed off from the outside world. Several months ago, US forces walled off the entire predominantly Sunni district of al-A’zamiyah, limiting access to gated areas that can be closed at any time the US forces and their local puppet allies decide to do so….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37481

ACLU Announces Publication of Administration of Torture, a Groundbreaking Account of Prisoner Abuse in U.S. Custody Abroad
ACLU
The American Civil Liberties Union and Columbia University Press today announce the publication of Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond. Written by ACLU attorneys Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh, the book presents a detailed account of the treatment of prisoners held in U.S. detention centers in Afghanistan , Iraq , and Guantánamo Bay. Based on thousands of government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the book supplies substantial evidence that the torture and abuse of prisoners was systemic and resulted from decisions made by senior U.S. officials, both military and civilian…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37480

Nearly 4.5 million displaced and refugees in Iraq, says UNHCR
Associated Press
Violence and lack of income has caused nearly 4.5 million Iraqis to seek shelter elsewhere in their country or flee abroad, the U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday. With numbers rising steadily, there are now nearly 2.3 million people displaced inside Iraq, said Astrid van Genderen Stort of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The number of Iraqis fleeing to neighboring countries has reached more than 2.2 million, van Genderen Stort told The Associated Press. “It’s just been going up slowly,” she said….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37475

War News for Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Iraq today
…US airstrike in Iraq kills 11, including civilians. The U.S. military said six Iraqi civilians were among 11 people killed in an air strike by an attack helicopter north of Baghdad early on Tuesday. The military said it had been targeting a group of five men who fled into a house after the helicopter crew saw them planting a roadside bomb in an area south of Samarra. Residents said 14 people were killed, including women and children. MORE on the above incident – Police and residents of the village of Djila, however, gave a different account, saying the group of men attacked by the helicopter were three farmers who had left their homes at 4.30 a.m. (0130 GMT) to irrigate their fields. Two were killed in the initial air strike and the survivor ran back to his home, where other residents then gathered, said Abdul al-Rahman Iyadeh, a relative of the victims. The second air strike completely destroyed the house, killing 14 people, including six members of the Ibrahim Jassim family and five from another, he told Reuters. A local police officer, Captain Abdullah al-Isawi, put the death toll at 16 — seven men, six women and three children…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37478