IRAQ: Child prisoners abused and tortured, say activists
IRIN News
Iraqi NGOs have raised concerns about the condition of children in local prisons, saying they are abused and tortured during interrogation. “Children are being treated as adults in Iraqi prisons and our investigations have shown that they are being abused and tortured,” said Khalid Rabia’a, a spokesman for the Prisoners’ Association for Justice (PAJ). “Our investigation started after families brought their five sons to our organisation looking for psychological help for their children who were recently released from prison, and what we found out was shocking,” Rabia’a added. According to Rabia’a, child prisoners between 13 and 17 are being accused of supporting insurgents and militias. Most were detained during Iraqi army military operations in the Baghdad neighbourhoods of Adhamiya, Latifiya, Alawi, Doura and Hay al-Adel…

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Iraq is still the issue – Part 2: Amerika’s New Iraq – The Quiz
Gabriele Zamparini, The Cat’s Dream
….This Quiz could have never been possible without the generous contribution of the so-called international community, starting with the pathetic United Nations and its grotesque International Criminal Court, those human rights groups that are in the empire-building business, that excellent Western propaganda apparatus composed by “the media” and the intelligentsia Joseph Goebbels would be proud and many other actors (and there are really too many to mention here) who played a first, second or third role in the annihilation of Iraq. Hopefully the Western citizenry has enjoyed the show so far, after all that show has been possible only because of the leaders and representatives we have elected and the tax-money we have paid to them. Thank God we got Democracy!….

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Papier Mâché…
Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues
….You are not only being fed lies, you entertain those lies by constantly lying to yourselves as well. The ILLEGAL invasion and occupation of Iraq. Its massive, irremediable DESTRUCTION. Its untold suffering. Its deaths in the millions. Its refugees in the millions. Its plundering in the billions of $. Its rape and torture; physical, geographical, psychological, social, spiritual…right down to the individual body. Its contamination with the most lethal chemical weapons in history; DU, phosphorus bombs, Neutron bombs, cluster bombs, Napalm…
Its stripping it away from any identity, from its history, from its roots, from its people…and I can go on and on and on… ALL of that has failed to MOVE YOU TO ACT. And that despite your knowing “alternative medias” and reading hundreds of articles, and joining hands in prayers, and participating in conferences and giving speeches and showing up on you tube, and blogging and interviews… and, and, and… And you want me to believe your lies of how you have been robbed of the ideals of what your nation stood for ? Who are you kidding here ? You are kidding none but yourselves. Iraq was the golden opportunity that you have deliberately or stupidly failed to seize. And I call that BAD FAITH. Iraq was the golden historical opportunity for you to finally put into practice those “ideals of your founding fathers” that you o’ so preach about all the time… But you did NOT. And that is a FACT!….

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Torture, Paramilitarism, Occupation and Genocide
Stephen Lendman
On October 5, George Bush confronted a public uproar and defended his administration claiming “This government does not torture people.” Again he lied. Once secret US Department of Justice (DOJ) legal opinions confirm the Bush administration condones torture by endorsing “the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.” It also condones paramilitary thuggery, oppressive occupation, and genocide. This unholy combination is the ugly face of an imperial nation run by war criminals. That’s the state of things today. First, the practice of torture….

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Iraq’s Environmental Crisis
Ecological Warfare
Jeffrey St. Clair & Joshua Frank
…More than 15 years later, the health consequences from this radioactive bombing campaign are beginning to come into focus. And they are dire. Iraqi physicians call it “the white death”-leukemia. Since 1990, the incident rate of leukemia in Iraq has grown by more than 600 percent. The situation was compounded by Iraq’s forced isolation and the sadistic sanctions regime, once described by former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan as “a humanitarian crisis”, that made detection and treatment of the cancers all the more difficult. Most of the leukemia and cancer victims aren’t soldiers. They are civilians. Depleted uranium is a rather benign sounding name for uranium-238, the trace elements left behind when the fissionable material is extracted from uranium-235 for use in nuclear reactors and weapons. For decades, this waste was a radioactive nuisance, piling up at plutonium processing plants across the country. By the late 1980s there was nearly a billion tons of the material….

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Much like Auschwitz
Khaled Amayreh
A few weeks ahead of the upcoming “peace conference” in Annapolis, Maryland, Israel has been displaying its “goodwill” towards the Palestinians. At the notorious Kitziot Prison, a real concentration camp minus gas chambers, crack Israeli soldiers have been ganging up on helpless and fettered Palestinian prisoners, shooting, beating and humiliating them under largely concocted pretexts. On Monday 22 October, in the quiet hours before dawn, hundreds of soldiers from two notoriously brutal army units, code-named Nachshon and Massada, stormed the prisoner camp for what was described as a “routine inspection”. During these routine inspections, inmates are forced to take off their clothes and are subject to every imaginable form of humiliation. Whoever protests is normally placed in open-ended solitary confinement…

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Iraq PM Salih at Brookings, California Burns, Our Useless Peace Movement
karlmarxwasright
…Lest anyone have any doubts, Iraq “federalism,” meaning privatization, has been reaffirmed, as it was in Rubaie’s speech, without doubt, without question. And, in the usual doublespeak, according to Salih, this time, Iraq’s current political difficulties have to do with a “profound” transition from a “command,” as they like to phrase it, to a market based economy. Actually, they do not even say market based, they usually use euphemisms like free, democratic, etc. To describe the current problems with Iraq’s government, effectively, Salih paraphrased former Defense Secy Rumsfeld’s Orwellian statement to the effect, “democracy is messy.” Growing pains!…

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IRAQ: Mental problems and stress disorders increase
IRIN News
Salah Hashimy, 14, has lost his parents, sisters and many friends since the US-led invasion in 2003; finally there was no one to look after him. He lacks education, love and support, a combination that, according to doctors, caused his mental health problems. “My memory is very weak but I cannot forget when I saw my sister being raped by militants until she died,” Hashimy said. Hashimy, who is being treated at Ibn-Rushd psychiatric hospital in Baghdad, has at last found a place to stay at Keeping Children Alive (KCA), a local NGO that takes care of children with mental disorders. However, after recent threats against the NGO, Salah might have to find another place to live if it is forced to close….

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Turkey: U.S. Will Not Stop Iraq Incursion; 64 Suspected Rebels Killed
Associated Press
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday that U.S. objections would not stop Turkey from crossing into Iraq to eliminate Kurdish rebels. The Turkish military said it had killed more than 30 insurgents who were poised to launch an attack, near the Iraqi border. President Abdullah Gul said Turkey is running out of patience with the Kurdish separatist attacks. A steady stream of U.S.-made Turkish fighter jets roared into the sky near the Iraqi border, apparently loaded with bombs. The Turkish military said it had spotted a “group of terrorists” near a military outpost in the province of Semdinli close to the border with Iraq on Tuesday and fired on them with tanks, artillery and other heavy weaponry. It said the group had been preparing for an attack….

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Government officials liaise with oil smugglers, customs official says
Azzaman
Government officials in the southern city of Basra assist smugglers to illegally ship crude oil to Iran, the head of the Customs Commission in the city said. Brigadier Khalaf Badran said the officials issue certificates to oil tanker drivers ostensibly to allow them to transport oil products inside the country. He refused to give names or titles. “But they use these permits to pass through checkpoints and security controls on their way to unload their cargo onto special boats along the shores of the Shat al-Arab Waterway,” Badran said….

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Seymour Hersh, Scott Ritter and the ‘Imminent’ War on Iran
Andrew Winkler, The Rebel Media Group
For the past couple of years, the dissident media scene has been abuzz with warnings of an imminent USraeli attack on Iran. First, the reason given was the opening of the Tehran oil bourse, then Ahmadinejad’s ‘wipe Israel off the map’ remark. When that was debunked as fabricated by MEMRI, Mossad’s free translation service, we were told it’s because of Ahmadinejad’s persistent questioning of the Holocaust, and the unfounded hysteria about Iran’s nuclear programme….

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BLAMING THE VICTIM ~~ ISRAEL’S OLDEST GAME
Desert Peace
In an attempt to turn POPULAR support against Hamas in Gaza, Israel is planning to cut electricity supplies to the area. The entire Strip is already sealed off, isolated even from it’s own people in the Occupied West Bank, cutting off the power supplies will increase the suffering of the population. What makes Israel think that Hamas will be blamed for this? What makes Israel think that the people will turn against their democratically elected government? The former President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas is the one fingers are being pointed at, as well as the United States … for collaborating with the enemy and allowing the Palestinian nation to be divided in two. Israel’s plan and motives will not work… Palestine might remain in darkness but there is still enough light to see who the real enemy is…

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Lebanese army fired at Israeli airplanes, sends a message to the US
Roads to Iraq
Excellent, great symbolic answer from the Lebanese army showing the Americans that the army don’t not change its principles and ideology. Washington seeks that the Lebanese army changes its loyalty Military support from the US but not to the Lebanese army but to Lebanese intelligence,…..In their view, the army remains a source of danger, as long as it did not change the political loyalty,………….the army still considers Israel as an enemy………….The support will continue if Army commander Michael Suleiman denounces the Lebanese and the Palestinian resistance….

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Lebanese Troops Fire on Israeli Jets
SAM F. GHATTAS, Associated Press Writer
Lebanese troops opened fire Thursday on Israeli warplanes flying low over southern Lebanon, but no hits were reported, Lebanese officials said. Israeli warplanes frequently fly over Lebanese airspace in what Israel says are reconnaissance missions, but this was the first time the Lebanese army has fired on the aircraft since an Aug. 14, 2006, cease-fire ended a monthlong war between Israeli and Hezbollah guerrillas. Lebanese soldiers opened up with machine guns and light anti-aircraft weapons mounted on armored vehicles at two planes that flew by just east of Marjayoun town near the border at midmorning, a Lebanese security official said. A total of 150 rounds were fired, he added….

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Ramzy Baroud: Peace Conference: New Case for War
Ramzy Baroud, Special to PalestineChronicle.com
The Middle East peace conference proposed by the Bush administration is clearly a smokescreen, aimed at concealing the true intentions of US foreign policy in the region. In the predictable process of rewarding ‘moderate’ allies and chastising ‘extremist’ foes, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will most likely receive the accolades befitting a peacemaker, while his protagonists in Hamas are reprimanded, demonized and further isolated. But the ultimate goal of this charade is not even so much to isolate Hamas, but rather to set in motion events that will further isolate Iran and Syria…

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Turkey: US Will Not Stop Iraq Incursion
SELCAN HACAOGLU, Associated Press Writer
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday that U.S. objections would not stop Turkey from crossing into Iraq to eliminate Kurdish rebels. The Turkish military said it had killed more than 30 insurgents who were poised to launch an attack, near the Iraqi border. President Abdullah Gul said Turkey is running out of patience with the Kurdish separatist attacks. A steady stream of U.S.-made Turkish fighter jets roared into the sky near the Iraqi border, apparently loaded with bombs…

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Afghanistan is lost, says Lord Ashdown
Tom Coghlan, Telegraph
Nato has “lost in Afghanistan” and its failure to bring stability there could provoke a regional sectarian war “on a grand scale”, according to Lord Ashdown. The former United Nations High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina delivered his dire prediction after being proposed as a new “super envoy” role in Afghanistan. Lord Ashdown said: “We have lost, I think, and success is now unlikely.”….

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Two U.S. soldiers killed, eight wounded in Salah el-Din
Voices of Iraq
The U.S. army said on Thursday that two soldiers were killed and eight more were injured during separate combat operations in Salah el-Din province. “One MNC-I soldier was killed and five soldiers were wounded on Wednesday during combat operations near the city of Baiji,” the U.S. military said in a statement received by the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI) “One Coalition Forces soldier died of wounds as a result of injuries from a mine explosion while conducting operations in Salah el-Din on Oct 24,” the army said in another statement….

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Palestinian elderly patient dies at Erez after IOF troops denied him access
Palestinian Information Center
The Palestinian center for human rights on Thursday condemned the IOA’s “exaggerated and unjustified” security measures at the Beit Hanun (Erez) crossing that killed a Palestinian old man who was suffering from a heart attack a couple of days ago. The PCHR explained in a statement that the IOF soldiers manning the crossing refused to allow the 77-year-old man into the 1948 occupied lands for treatment despite obtaining prior approval. It called on the international community especially the signatories to the fourth Geneva Convention in 1949 along with WHO, Red Cross and other UN specialized agencies to pressure the IOA into allowing Palestinian patients in the Gaza Strip access into West Bank or Israeli hospitals….

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Report: Fatah instigating conflict between Islamic Jihad, Hamas
Roee Nahmias, Ynet
Since Hamas’ violent takeover of Gaza, their rivals in Fatah have been trying to regain control of the coastal strip—or at least regain some respect. The Nazareth-based daily al-Sinara reports that Fatah members have been slyly joining other Palestinian groups, such as the Islamic Jihad, in an attempt to push these groups toward confrontation with Hamas. Fatah activists in question did not join other Palestinian groups to aid them, but rather to “incite them into a civil war with Hamas,” he continued….

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Teacher killed in gruesome Iraq shooting
KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer
A Sunni schoolteacher was hijacked as he drove to visit his sister in a predominantly Shiite area of Baghdad on Thursday. His body was found an hour later with three gunshots to his eyes. Iraqi police blamed Shiite gang members for the killing — a grim reminder that sectarian hatreds and crimes persist regardless of declining violence in the capital. Ahmed al-Janabi, a 45-year-old father of three, was stopped at a southwest Baghdad intersection by gunmen in two cars. They drove him away in his own car after inspecting his national ID and food ration card. His name doomed him: the al-Janabi tribe is mainly Sunni…

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