GI Special 5K13: The Numbers Game – November 17, 2007
Thomas F. Barton
…Here are some numbers that the Pentagon refuses to recognize, for whatever reason: 1) About 60,000 soldiers are stop-lossed or involuntarily extended. According to Army G-1 PAO, only 8,000 are currently stop-lossed, and this does not count involuntary extension, which the Pentagon does not keep track of. Oh, and the date of their last information? April 2007. Just try calling any unit headed to OIF 07-09 and ask how many are stop-lossed. The answer is almost 50%. 2) 13,000 soldiers are AWOL. 600 officers are also missing. The number has almost doubled in the last month. Again, G-1 refuses to release any information newer than April. And all the information they do release is doctored by their small army of number-crunching battle-captains working round-the-clock. 3) 5,000 soldiers have gone AWOL in the last 2 weeks. 4) The number of suicides, released in July, was for FY05, last time of information TWO AND A HALF YEARS OLD. But this was the highest number of suicides in 26 years. Imagine what it looks like this year, after things have gotten worse, and all sorts of ‘surge’ related extensions.5) 370,000 Iraqis were forced out of their homes in September of this year alone. This is a greater than 1000% increase in displacement. And yet, Maliki and Petraeus want you to believe that violence is dropping….

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Pentagon Cover Up
15,000 or More US Deaths in Iraq War?
MIKE WHITNEY
The Pentagon has been concealing the true number of American casualties in the Iraq War. The real number exceeds 15,000 and CBS News can prove it. CBS’s Investigative Unit wanted to do a report on the number of suicides in the military and “submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Defense”. After 4 months they received a document which showed—that between 1995 and 2007— there were 2,200 suicides among “active duty” soldiers. Baloney. The Pentagon was covering up the real magnitude of the “suicide epidemic”. Following an exhaustive investigation of veterans’ suicide data collected from 45 states; CBS discovered that in 2005 alone “there were at least 6,256 among those who served in the armed forces. That’s 120 each and every week in just one year.”….

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Iraq Occupation Facts
Iraq Solidarity Campaign
FACTS: There are 8 Million Iraqis in need of emergency aid. 43% of Iraqis suffer from absolute poverty. Child malnutrition 19% in 2003 and 28% in 2007. 92% of Iraqi children suffer from Learning problems because of the situation. According to the UNAMI report for the 1st April untill 30th June 2007 states: 47% of IDPs are not receiving their food rations. This is in contrast to a distribution rate of 96% before the war in 2003.At least 40% of the educated and experienced Iraqi workers have left the country. 70% of Displaced Iraqis are women….

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Did Afghan bodyguards massacre civilians? UN report says gunfire from panicking security detail hit most of 180 bombing victims after bomb went off
The Associated Press
Up to two-thirds of the 77 people killed and 100 wounded in a suicide bombing last week were hit by bullets from visiting lawmakers’ panicked bodyguards, who fired on a crowd of mostly schoolchildren for up to five minutes, a preliminary UN report says. Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry says only a “small number” of the victims were hit by gunfire, but an Afghan official in Baghlan province told The Associated Press that bodyguards were “raining bullets” on the crowd. The suicide bomb contained ball bearings, the Interior Ministry said, which may have caused wounds that look like bullet holes. An Afghan doctor who treated patients after the Nov. 6 blast, meanwhile, told the AP that a high-ranking government official told him not to publicly reveal the number of gunfire victims, suggesting a possible government cover-up….

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What is a Jewish state?
From Khalid Amayreh in Occupied West Jerusalem
Seeking to perpetuate institutionalized racism and systematic discrimination against its non-Jewish citizens, the apartheid Israeli state has been incessantly trying to blackmail the weak and vulnerable Palestinian Authority (PA) into recognizing the Zionist state as “an exclusively Jewish state.” Some Israeli officials have used terms such as “a state of the Jews, for the Jews, and by the Jews.” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been quoted as saying that Israel wouldn’t recognize a prospective Palestinian state on the West Bank unless the PA recognized Israel as “a state of the Jews.” Israeli leaders are reluctant to tell the world what they exactly mean by “a state of the Jews,” ostensibly to save themselves the embarrassment of the implied racism inherent in the concept….

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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Saturday, 17 November 2007.
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. www.freearabvoice.org
…In a dispatch posted Saturday, the Yaqen News Agency reported that US forces bombed the home of Thamir ‘Uqayl Ghazzal in the al-Ma’mal neighborhood of the city of Samarra’, 120km north of Baghdad on Saturday. Yaqen reported eyewitnesses as saying that the American attack completely destroyed the house and killed seven members of Ghazzal’s family and wounded four more. The bodies of the dead were still buried under the rubble at the time of reporting and American forces had cordoned off the area, preventing anyone from approaching to view the scene or undertake rescue and recovery. The Americans, meanwhile, were combing other areas warning residents to leave their homes in the al-’Armushiyah and al-Ma’mal area so the US forces could blow them up….

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Mississippi Supreme Court, 1926: Waterboarding illegal torture
Stephen Soldz
The Is That Legal? site informs us that, in 1926, the Mississippi Supreme Court found that “the water cure” [aka “waterboarding”] was illegal torture, and threw out a conviction obtained with its us (…) In 1926, the Mississippi Supreme Court called the water cure torture. No qualifiers. No hedging. Just plain, good ol’ fashion torture . . . and therefore a forbidden means for securing a confession. These men were hardly a group I’d call *activist* or *liberal* and certainly not bent on subverting our country in the name of coddling criminals. In a case called Fisher v. State, 110 So. 361, 362 (Miss. 1926), Mississippi’s highest court ordered the retrial of a convicted murderer because his confession was secured by a local sheriff’s use of the water cure….

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Leaked Guantanamo Document Confirms Routine Use of Isolation as Psychological Torture. Will APA Protest?
Stephen Soldz
Recently a major 2003 Guantanamo Standard Operating Procedures [SOP] manual was posted on the wikileaks web site. Ignored by most major sources for a week, Reuters, has picked up on the leak Thursday and the New York Times on Friday. The Reuters article comments especially on two revelations from the SOP. The first of these revelations, which is also the focus of the New York Times piece, is that, despite claims to the contrary, the US was hiding detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross…

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Toxic treatment
Esti Ahronovitz, Haaretz
Jamal Harma sits in a coffee shop in the village of Hawara, near Nablus. He comes from the Balata refugee camp. His friendly appearance, his smile and courtesy, conceal a broken man. His daughter Farah died of cancer (…) The papers show that Farah was given radiation with a Cobalt 60 machine. The lawsuit claims that this is a very outdated radiation instrument that has not been used for medical purposes in Israeli hospitals for years. Today there are more modern machines than the Cobalt 60, but these are used in a limited fashion, and only for very specific purposes. “As far as is known,” says Sfard, “the standard method of radiation treatment is with a linear accelerator. As a matter of fact, Assuta Hospital is the only medical institution that still administers radiation with a Cobalt 60, and it does not do so to Israelis. The only use made of this machine at Assuta is for the treatments the hospital gives Palestinians as part of the agreement with the PA.” (…) In the lawsuit, Sfard maintains that Assuta Hospital acted according to a discriminatory standard and followed a much lower medical standard than it does when treating Israelis. “The hospital violated its constitutional duty to preserve human dignity.” Sfard adds that “when Assuta was asked to clarify its numerous faults, what was uncovered was an indifferent and racist system motivated by financial considerations, to the point that the hospital’s paramount and central role of treating the sick seemed to have been forgotten.”…

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‘Safe’ uranium that left a town contaminated
David Rose, The Observer
It is 50 years since Tony Ciarfello and his friends used the yard of a depleted uranium weapons factory as their playground in Colonie, a suburb of Albany in upstate New York state. ‘There wasn’t no fence at the back of the plant,’ remembers Ciarfello. ‘Inside was a big open ground and nobody would chase us away. We used to play baseball and hang by the stream running through it. We even used to fish in it – though we noticed the fish had big pink lumps on them.’ Today there are lumps on Ciarfello’s chest – strange, round tumours that protrude about an inch (…) The US federal government and the firm that ran the factory, National Lead (NL) Industries, have been assuring former workers and residents around the 18-acre site for decades that, although it is true that the plant used to produce unacceptable levels of radioactive pollution, it was not a serious health hazard. Now, in a development with potentially devastating implications not only for Colonie but also for the future use of some of the West’s most powerful weapon systems, that claim is being challenged. In a paper to be published in the next issue of the scientific journal Science of the Total Environment, a team led by Professor Randall Parrish of Leicester University reports the results of a three-year study of Colonie, funded by Britain’s Ministry of Defence. Parrish’s team has found that DU contamination, which remains radioactive for millions of years, is in effect impossible to eradicate, not only from the! environ ment but also from the bodies of humans…

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UN: West Bank fence severs Palestinans farmers from fields
The Associated Press
Only 18 percent of some 30,000 West Bank farmers who used to work the lands cut off by Israel’s separation fence now have Israeli permits to reach their fields, the United Nations said in a report on the lives of some 230,000 Palestinians in 67 communities close to the fence. The report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs looked at 15 communities with about 10,000 residents trapped between the fence and Israel, and at 52 communities with 220,000 residents on the Palestinian side of the divider….

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Turkish artillery maneuvers on border- source
Voices of Iraq
Turkish tanks conducted military drills on borders with northern Iraq on Friday morning and returned to their barracks late in the evening, said an official source from Duhuk’s border guard forces. “Turkish forces carried out short military maneuvers inside the Iraqi-Turkish-Syrian border triangle before they returned to their barracks inside Turkish territory,” the source, who requested anonymity, told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI). “Maneuvers have become common from the Turkish side,” the source added. Eyewitnesses from Zakho district in northern Kurdistan told VOI that they saw Turkish tanks approaching the Iraqi borders….

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Cars UK gave to Basra police now stolen
Gethin Chamberlain, Telegraph
Two thirds of the cars supplied by Britain to Iraqi security forces in Basra have gone missing, presumed stolen, according to the city’s police chief. Major Gen Abdel Jalil Khalif blamed corrupt police officers in the southern city, which is due to be handed over by British forces to Iraqi control next month. He said that of 4,000 vehicles received from the British Army in southern Iraq since the invasion in 2003, only 1,334 could now be accounted for. He claimed he was cracking down on corrupt officers who were co-ordinating robberies, assassinations and terrorist acts in Basra. “Even our intelligence network is infiltrated with elements from the militias and armed groups,” he said….

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The Talibanization of Pakistan
Mitch Potter, Toronto Star
…Reports from the Pakistani side suggest that even after two weeks of emergency rule imposed ostensibly to push back pro-Taliban militants, forces loyal to President Gen. Pervez Musharraf continue to lose ground in the tribal region of Swat, the scene of heavy aerial attacks this week. But from an Afghan point of view, the most disturbing news came in a two-part series this week by Asia Times correspondent Syed Saleem Shahzad datelined from the Nawa Pass overlooking the border. Shahzad quoted a senior Taliban figure as saying a wide range of like-minded militant groups, including the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda, have agreed on a declaration of independence, with the goal of establishing an “Islamic emirate” that will eat into territory on both sides of the border…

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Report: Israeli soldiers, settlers killed 38 Palestinian children in 2007
Ma’an News
Israeli military forces and settlers killed 38 Palestinian children and injured 209 children between January and September of 2007, according to a new report from the British charity Save the Children.By the end of September, 335 children were jailed in Israeli detention facilities, most of them from poor households in the northern West Bank. 29 children were killed in inter-factional fighting in the occupied territories. Save the Children also reported at least 11 incidents in which Israeli troops attacked Palestinian Authority and UNRWA-run schools. In six of these attacks, the soldiers used either teargas, sound bomb, or stun grenades.

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Palestinian cancer patient dies after IOA blocked his travel for treatment
Palestinian Information Center
A Palestinian young man died of cancer in Gaza on Saturday after the Israeli occupation authority refused to allow him to travel abroad for treatment, medical sources announced. They said that Nael Al-Kurdi, 22, was suffering from cancer and was supposed to travel abroad for treatment but the IOA tight closure of the Strip prevented his travel. The sources affirmed that the IOA absolutely refused to grant Kurdi permit to travel outside the Strip. For his part, Rami Abdo, the spokesman for the popular anti-sanctions committee said that dozens of similar cases were threatened with death if the Gaza crossings remained closed. …

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Austrian bishops barred from Jewish holy site in Jerusalem for wearing crosses
The Associated Press
Thirteen Austrian bishops were barred from praying at Jerusalem’s Western Wall last week by Jewish religious authorities when they refused to take off their crosses, according to Austrian officials. On a planned visit on Thursday to the wall — the holiest place where Jews can pray — the bishops were given an ultimatum by the rabbi of the site: Either remove the crosses or stand behind a fence several meters (yards) from the site. The bishops refused the request and watched people praying from behind the fence, according to an Austrian official….

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U.S. accused of taking sides in Shiite factional fighting
Nidhal al-Laithi, Azzaman
The U.S. is providing “logistic and intelligence assistance” to a rival Shiite faction to weaken the Sadr Movement, a movement’s senior official said. Bahaa al-Araji said the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, a leading ally of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, was working to undermine the movement and to provoke its military wing. The Islamic council’s military organization, the Badr Corps militias, is among the best armed and equipped irregular army in Iraq. Maliki’s Dawaa party also has its own militia forces. The two militia factions are reported to have mounted a unified front against Sadr’s Mahdi Army in several cities in the south, particularly in Karbala and Najaf….

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Iraq seeks deeper Iran-U.S. dialogue on security
Dean Yates, Reuters
Iraq is encouraged by signs of a thaw in ties between Iran and the United States over security in Iraq but wants the two sides to have a “proper dialogue” about the issue, the Iraqi government spokesman said on Saturday. U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker has held three rounds of talks with his Iranian counterpart this year on Iraqi security, easing a diplomatic freeze that lasted almost three decades. Crocker has said he expected more discussions soon. A fourth round would follow the U.S. military’s release this month of nine Iranian prisoners held in Iraq and comments by the U.S. military that unofficial assurances from Iran it would stop the flow of bombs into Iraq appeared to be holding….

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Mass grave found in Baghdad suburb
Aljazeera.net
Remains of possibly dozens of people believed killed in sectarian violence have been unearthed from a mass grave in a former al-Qaeda stronghold in southern Baghdad. It was the third such find in Iraq this month. The remains included those of women and children. An Awakening Council of local leaders, an anti-al-Qaeda group which oversees neighbourhood policing, discovered at least 30 decomposing bodies in the Hay Asia area of Dora on Saturday, an Iraqi interior ministry official said. They were discovered in an area of Dora that overlooks the main highway leading to Shia shrine cities in the south….

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PalestineFreeVoice Photographer Won Third Price in Photo Competiton “Human Rights”
PalestineFreeVoice Novembre
I am happy to officially announce that Fady Adwan photo journalist, human rights and team work member of PalestineFreeVoice won the third price in the INTERNATIONAL ON-LINE EDITION “HUMAN RIGHTS” in a photographic competition organized by the Association Amateurs Photography of Catania on Sicily. Fady Adwan’s photo “ Innocent” won the third place of the section B of ACAF international photo competition….

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