Plans To Destroy Turkey
Mohammad Khalifa
…But why is this American contradiction politics against Turkey? What is Turkey’s fault to be served as such action? Is not Turkey a member in NATO since 1952, and has an American military base in “Incirlik”? Actually Turkey’s fault is still to be an empire country, so its area is approximately 800 thousand M2 and the population is nearly 70 million. Its social life consisted of various ethnics and many kinds of religion. There are a minority of Kurds reaches to 16 millions, minorities of Arabs about two millions, and sectarian minorities such as Alawis and Christian. In spite of the allies (as Britain and France) has punished the Ottomans after the Ottomans defeat in facing them in I. world war in 1918. They have had a vast land from Ottomans especially the western region, but Turkey remained a big country. In the framework of The Broader Middle East Project Turkey could be divided to several states on ethnicities and sectarian bases, at last get rid of Turks as they think that it is a super power in the region. USA is performing upon this project that aims to divide the big countries in Middle East to small states, and had started on applying with Iraq….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37759

Iraqi prisoners: interrogations depend on sectarian identity
niqash
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned that random arrests of Iraqi citizens have been continuing, after the number of “accidental” prisoners in Iraqi jails rose. Meanwhile, Iraqi prisoners’ rights organizations have confirmed that there have been human-rights violations and incidents against male and female prisoners in Iraqi prisons. US Army general Antonio Tagoba, who is of Filipino origin, is considered the first to have brought the issue of human-rights violations by U.S. troops against Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghreib prison in 2004. Meanwhile, an extensive search revealed a secret Interior Ministry prison in mid-2005, where torture was carried out, causing fears amongst observers of serious violations against prisoners. Newly-released prisoners have revealed that their rights were indeed violated and that their arrests came about “under sectarian circumstances, for sectarian reasons”….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37763

* * * NOT SATIRE * * *
US Department of Defense: “The increased number of attacks by the Taliban in recent days is a clear sign of their desperation.”
American Forces Press Service – US Department of Defense
In operations today in Afghanistan, national forces supported by a small team of coalition troops raided a compound in Amber Khaneh in the Bati Kot district of Nangarhar province, resulting in the death of a militant. While resisting multiple requests to surrender, the militant barricaded himself in a room. Unbeknownst to Afghan forces, his family was barricaded in the room with him. It wasn’t until after the hostilities had stopped and the team had performed a search of the room that they found two children dead. A wounded adult woman and another child were also found (…) “The Afghan national security forces caught the enemy off guard before they could cause any injury to the ANSF, coalition forces or Afghan citizens,” Belcher said. “The increased number of attacks by the Taliban in recent days is a clear sign of their desperation.”…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37781

Faulty Intel Source “Curve Ball” Revealed
60 Minutes: Iraqi’s Fabricated Story Of Biological Weapons Drove U.S. Arguments For Invading Iraq
CBS
60 Minutes has identified the man whose fabricated story of Iraqi biological weapons drove the U.S. argument for invading Iraq. It has also obtained video of “Curve Ball,” as he was known in intelligence circles, and discovered he was not only a liar, but also a thief and a poor student instead of the chemical engineering whiz he claimed to be. 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon’s two-year investigation will be broadcast this Sunday, Nov. 4, at 7 p.m. ET/PT. Curve Ball is an Iraqi defector named Rafid Ahmed Alwan, who arrived at a German refugee center in 1999…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37782

Israeli soldiers exchange photos of killed Palestinians
Rami Almeghari – IMEMC
Israeli soldiers have recently exchanged photos of killed Palestinians on their cellular phones, the Israeli Daily Ma’areef reported on Thursday. The daily explained that the soldiers have set photos of killed Palestinians as their mobiles’ screen pictures instead of their families’. The daily received a number of photos of those being exchanged by the soldiers and that some soldiers revealed that such photos have recently spread widely among soldiers, serving on Gaza-Israel border lines.’….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37761

Iraqi refugees: young girls are turning to prostitution
NIQASH
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) warned that the number of Iraqi refugees has now almost doubled since the end of last year, adding that Iraq is now the site of the Middle East’s biggest refugee crisis since the creation of Israel in 1948. The United Nations implored the international community to provide $60 million in emergency donations, in order to deal with the crisis. A specialist for the organization stated that one out of every eight Iraqis has now left their home, adding that half a million have been forced to leave in the last six months. Approximately 2 million people have left the country, while 1.7 million have been internally displaced. Authorities are clamoring for emergency aid for Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan. At the same time, Iraqi women’s organizations have blamed the current government for the rise in prostitution amongst female Iraqi refugees….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37764

As the world forgets Gaza
Saleh Al-Naami, Al-Ahram Weekly
…The suspension on imports of nitrous oxide to Gaza Strip hospitals had forced their administrations to close down surgery departments and halt operations, except for those absolutely vital. Following resumption of the importation of this gas, medical crews worked additional hours to perform surgeries that had been delayed due to its shortage. Yet Bassem Naim, health minister in Ismail Haniyeh’s dismissed government, says that the danger of Israel barring imports of nitrous oxide again remains. “There is a possibility of a health disaster occurring here anew, with patients dying because our hospitals are unable to conduct surgeries,” he told Al-Ahram Weekly. “There is a need for international intervention to prevent this catastrophe from happening.” Naim adds that the crisis the health sector is undergoing in the Gaza Strip is not limited to the possibility of nitrous oxide running out. It extends, rather, to the depletion of a number of medicines used in the treatment of patients with chronic illnesses….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37775

An Open Letter to the Southern Poverty Law Clinic
Do You Equate Anti-Zionism with Anti-Semitism?
FELICE PACE
…I am disturbed by an article that the Center published in the fall 2007 issue of “Intelligence Report”—the Center’s magazine. The item “Navy Extremist Disciplined—But Not for Extremism” is on page 11. The article focuses on Navy officer John Sharpe Jr. I do not question your assertion that Sharpe is an “extremist”—he may well also be anti-Semitic. However, the article appears to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. For example, as evidence for Sharpe’s anti-Semitism the article states: “Sharpe also has connections to Arab extremists that were ignored. On his website, for example, is an interview with Ibrahim Ebeid, a Baathist and supporter of Saddam Hussein. Ebeid says in the interview that ‘neo-cons and Zionists’ are responsible for a ‘vicious criminal war’ against Iraq and Palestine.” This is the evidence that you have used to determine that Ebeid is an “extremist”? If so, I too am an extremist and so are many American Progressives!…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37769

Help Kidnapped Palestine Activist
Pawel Bartolik, Viva Palestyna
I am speaking as the representative of Polish anti-war initiative Viva Palestyna, working for as long as six and a half of the year. Our friend, Anne, involved in action against the Israeli apartheid wall in Bilin village, one of the centers of the peaceful resistance, was kidnapped by Israeli “Defense” Forces in the middle of the night, November 29-30, during escalation against Palestinian people. She was taken to Tel Aviv where she is now waiting for deportation. Though planning to stay in Palestine for good, she didn’t have yet permanent place of residence in Bilin and she has left her passport and other personal things outside the house she was sleeping during Israeli invasion on the village….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37765

Turkey to upset history?? WWIII Has Begun
karlmarxwasright
…Three regional military forces combined have the capacities to halt, upset and overturn the above counterrevolutionary, reactionary American and global Fascist applecart and world history. First and foremost, Turkey’s military coupled with Iraq’s Arab resistance and then Russia’s military. Iraq’s resistance is already engaged. Turkey’s military is about to become so. As I’ve said previously, the US has effectively declared war on Turkey. And, then, whither Russia and what was its Red Army? Our psuedo-Left, fake American agenda in the US supports ALL of the following; anti-Putin, anti-Soviet, anti-Communist, JBANC, pro-Kurdistan, PKK, Iraq federalism agenda and its domestic corollaries, a sellout contract with between the UAW leadership and Chrylser, which has just announced another 12,000 job cut and lack of support for a universal, single payer health care system in the US. There are other issues, of course, but, these highlight the most basic, fundamental contradictions. Then, of course, the American pension fund investments. As a consequence, the US is and will continue to be plunged into an economic, political and military abyss…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37779

2 children die in US raid in Afghanistan
FISNIK ABRASHI, Associated Press Writer
A nighttime raid in eastern Afghanistan by U.S. and Afghan troops sparked a gunbattle that killed three people, including two children, and the military said Thursday it was investigating the deaths. Civilian casualties have incited resentment and demonstrations against U.S. and NATO forces, though officials blame militants who use civilian homes as cover during clashes. President Hamid Karzai has pleaded with Western forces to do all they can to prevent such deaths. The latest civilian casualties came as U.S. and Afghan troops raided a compound suspected of harboring militants belonging to a suicide bombing network. They were fired on as they approached late Wednesday in Bati Kot district in Nangarhar province, said Maj. Chris Belcher, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37776

A parallel PLO
Khaled Amayreh, Al-Ahram Weekly
The Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA) has been making frantic efforts to block the “national conference” that the Hamas-led opposition plans to convene in Damascus to highlight their rejection of the upcoming US- sponsored conference in Annapolis, Maryland, scheduled for November or early December. The conference in the Syrian capital was due to take place on 7 November but has been postponed, reportedly in order to coincide with the Annapolis conference…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37774

The Mega-Bunker of Baghdad
William Langewiesche, Vanity Fear
The new American Embassy in Baghdad will be the largest, least welcoming, and most lavish embassy in the world: a $600 million massively fortified compound with 619 blast-resistant apartments and a food court fit for a shopping mall. Unfortunately, like other similarly constructed U.S. Embassies, it may already be obsolete.

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37778

Gates: Iran assured Iraq on weapons
ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer
Iran apparently has assured the Iraqi government that it will stop the flow into Iraq of bomb-making materials and other weaponry that U.S. officials say has inflamed insurgent violence and caused many American troop casualties, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday. “It is my understanding that they have provided such assurances,” Gates told a Pentagon news conference. “I don’t know whether to believe them. I’ll wait and see.” He said he did not know who in Tehran made the promise (…) U.S. allegations of Iranian interference in Iraq are among the main sources of tension between Washington and Tehran, and have led some to speculate that it could lead to more direct U.S. military action against Iran. Gates said the Bush administration is unified in focusing on non-military solutions….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37772

Killing of Palestinian prisoner condemned
Press Release, United Against Torture Coalition
The United Against Torture Coalition (UAT), comprised of Israeli, Palestinian and international human rights NGOs that cooperate in the struggle to combat torture and abuse in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), is gravely concerned by the actions of the Israel Prison Service (IPS) in Ketziot Prison in the Negev that left one Palestinian prisoner dead and dozens more injured. On Monday 22 October, in the early hours of the morning, whilst the prisoners were sleeping, the IPS riot control unit, the Massada Unit, carried out a search in the prisoners’ quarters; this allegedly was a search for weapons and other items prohibited by the prison authorities. The prisoners reacted in self-defense and protested and the excessive response by the Massada Unit led to the death of one prisoner, Mohammad Sati Mohammad al-Ashkar, 29 years of age….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37771

The iron laws and ironies of a people denied
Beshara Doumani, The Journal of Palestine Studies
The central dynamic or iron law of the conflict over Palestine, since it began in the late nineteenth century, has been the adamant refusal by the most powerful forces in this conflict — the Zionist movement (later the Israeli government) and its key supporters (first Great Britain, later the United States) — either to recognize or to make room for the existence of Palestinians as a political community. This nonrecognition has made it possible for the twin engines of the conflict — territorial appropriation and demographic displacement of Palestinians from their ancestral lands — to continue operating largely unabated, as they have for over a century. It also explains, incidentally, Israel’s central public relations message, which is (as these things usually are) the reverse projection of reality: namely, that what needs to be recognized is Israel’s right to exist. In this sense, the boycott of the Palestinian Authority by Israel, the United States, and, to a lesser degree, the European Union following Hamas’s electoral victory in January 2006 is not a rupture but a continuation of a fundamental pattern in the history of the conflict….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37770

Bombs kill 3 U.S. soldiers in Iraq
Reuters
Roadside explosions killed three U.S. soldiers and wounded two in Iraq on Wednesday, the U.S. military said on Thursday, taking the number of U.S. deaths there in October to 39, the lowest since March 2006. The U.S. military said two soldiers died and two were wounded by an explosion in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. A third died in an explosion in Salahuddin province north of the capital Baghdad….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37767

Rice makes appeal as US diplomats resist forced duty in Iraq
AFP
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday made a worldwide appeal for her diplomats to serve in Iraq following uproar over new rules forcing them to work in the war-torn nation or risk dismissal. “The secretary is going to send out a cable worldwide to people talking about this decision as well as encouraging people to serve in Iraq,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. Rice’s cable came after an emotional meeting in Washington late Wednesday between senior State Department officials and hundreds of diplomats on the new policy forcing them to serve in Iraq effective at end-November. Diplomats have not been forced to serve abroad against their will since the Vietnam war era….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37780

Buying personal weapons by installments
NIQASH
Four years ago, personal weapons for Iraqis were signs of power and authority. At that time, exposing the handgrip of the pistol meant that the owner of the gun was a person authorized by a security service. With the fall of the former regime, carrying guns has become a common practice, same as carrying a pen, reading glasses or key chains. Jasim H., a police officer, says that, “today, those who do not hide guns under their clothes, have for sure guns in their homes.” According to estimates of the Ministry of Interior made during the days of the second provisional government, Iraqis have approximately some 5 million guns. In comparison with the old days, when carrying a gun required a prior license from the government, the law today allows Iraqis to keep guns without a prior permission from the government…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37766

Abizaid: Mideast wars may last 50 years
Associated Press
It might take as long as half a century before U.S. troops can leave the volatile Middle East, according to retired Army Gen. John Abizaid. “Over time, we will have to shift the burden of the military fight from our forces directly to regional forces, and we will have to play an indirect role, but we shouldn’t assume for even a minute that in the next 25 to 50 years the American military might be able to come home, relax and take it easy, because the strategic situation in the region doesn’t seem to show that as being possible,” Abizaid said Wednesday at Carnegie Mellon University…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37762

Congressional Shame and Duplicity
Stephen Lendman
The latest October Reuters/Zogby Index shows record low approval ratings for George Bush and Congress – 24% for the president that looks almost giddy compared to the bottom-scraping 11% level for the nation’s lawmakers. It’s more evidence that the criminal class in Washington is bipartisan and hoping November, 2008 will change things is pure fantasy. A voter groundswell sent a message last November to end the Iraq war and occupation. Instead, the Democrat-led 110th Congress continues to fund it generously…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=37783