4/12/07

Salman Abu-Sitta, Al-Ahram Weekly
At a time when TV screens are filled with images of perceived weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq among people who are on the verge of starvation, the West turns a blind eye to the first biological terrorist in the Middle East, Israel, where the largest depot of WMD between London and Peking is located. When confronted with the anomaly, the United States ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, responds with typical cynicism, “Israel did not use these weapons against its people or its neighbours.” Assuming that the ambassador is well-informed, this statement is a patent lie. Israel used biological weapons even before it was created on Arab soil in 1948 and ever since. The purpose, according to Ben Gurion, is genocide, and if not complete, the purpose is not to allow the dispossessed Palestinians to return to their homes…

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UNHCR: Lebanon Violating International Principles
Michael Bluhm, Daily Star
Lebanon is violating international principles by indefinitely detaining Iraqi refugees until they agree to go back to Iraq, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) regional representative Stephane Jacquemet said Tuesday. Lebanese authorities present the refugees in custody with two options: indefinite incarceration or consenting to return to Iraq, said a report released Tuesday by the international non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) and entitled “Rot Here or Die There.” Lebanese security services have arrested almost 600 Iraqi refugees this year because the displaced entered the country illegally, but the authorities have set free only about 100 of those who completed their sentences for the offense, Jacquemet said….

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Video: New country
Mohammed, Last of Iraqis
In this video I used a song called “The new country” for a very popular Iraqi singer who is Husam AlRasam, it’s not a new song, and it was released when I started blogging. This song is very popular between Iraqis, I can say that more than 80% of Iraqis have it either on their mobile phones or computers.
There is something strange in this song, whenever I hear it I twitch although I’ve heard it countless times, believe me in Arabic it’s much more effective, because the emotions were lost in translation, but I think the images compensates for that loss….

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Marines Request ‘Long-Range Blow Torch’ for Iraq;
Sharon Weinberger
Exactly one year ago today, the First Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq signed off on an “urgent operational need” for an airborne tactical laser that could, in the words of the formal request, create “instantaneous burst-combustion of insurgent clothing, a rapid death through violent trauma, and more probably a morbid combination of both.” Although the request is based on the technology of the Advanced Tactical Laser, a chemical laser integrated on an AC-130 gunship, the request suggests that a laser weapon could eventually be put on other aircraft, such as drones or, as the picture shows, the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor craft. According to the Marines’ laser request, obtained by DANGER ROOM, this so-called Precision Airborne Standoff Directed Energy Weapon (PASDEW) wouldn’t just be an improved killed machine. It would also have particularly devastating psychological effects. Such weapons, when used against people, “can be compared to long range blow torches or precision flame throwers, with corresponding psychological advantages for [Coalition Forces] CF.”…

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GI Special 5L4: A Soldier Speaks Against The War [ December 5, 2007 ]
Thomas F. Barton
Soldier Speaks Against The War:
He Does Not Want To See Troops “Die For Nothing”
He said the Army is sending unqualified soldiers into the war and that many are given inadequate training. He cited the National Training Center in California, where troops train before deployment. He said the center is a waste of government money and time.
He presented a video he took at the center.
One soldier on the video said he’d rather be in Iraq than at the center.

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Israel to build in East Jerusalem
Rory McCarthy, The Guardian
Israel’s housing ministry said yesterday it plans to build 307 new homes in a settlement in East Jerusalem, drawing swift condemnation from Palestinian officials. Tenders were published for housing units in Har Homa, a settlement to the south-east of the city on land captured by Israel in the 1967 war and later annexed. East Jerusalem is now home to around 200,000 Jewish settlers. Most of the international community does not recognise Israel’s annexation of the east of the city….

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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Tuesday, 4 December 2007
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. www.freearabvoice.org
…In a dispatch posted at 10:38pm Baghdad time Tuesday night, the Yaqen News Agency reported that the US military admitted that one more of its troops had been killed and two more wounded in an Iraqi Resistance explosion in al-Anbar Province. Yaqen reported a US statement as announcing that one American soldier had been killed and two more of them wounded when a bomb exploded by his vehicle on combat operations somewhere in al-Anbar Province on Monday….

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One in a shroud, one on crutches
Gideon Levy, Haaretz
The prisoners went to sleep after the evening roll call. At 2 A.M. they woke in a panic when hundreds of armed warders from the Masada and Nahshon units of the Israel Prisons Service (IPS) raided their tents. Quickly the scene turned into a battlefield. The warders fired at the inmates with a variety of weapons; the inmates fought back by throwing vegetables and other random objects. According to affidavits submitted by a number of prisoners to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, the warders were extremely brutal. They shot inmates and beat them with truncheons even when they lay bound on the floor, and forced more than 400 prisoners into a small visitors’ room. The result: one prisoner killed by ammunition of unknown type – though the testimonies indicate that he was shot in the head at close range – and a large number of prisoners wounded…

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Palestine: Moving beyond collective denial
Arjan El Fassed, The Electronic Intifada
…It was shocking to see Mahmoud Abbas, the designated head of the US-sponsored Palestinian Authority, warmly applaud the acknowledgement of Israel as a “Jewish state” and “homeland for the Jewish people” in Bush’s inaugural speech at Annapolis. With his clapping hands, Abbas supported the denial of his people’s history, in particular the 1948 mass expulsion that included the destruction of 531 villages and has been followed by the forced removal of Palestinians ever since. With his smile and embrace, Abbas implied just like his partners, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the US president, that the conflict started in 1967, instead of 1948 and even beforehand, and that the main problem is Palestinian terror rather than Israeli colonialization and oppression. With the US president and the Israeli prime minister demanding Palestinians to recognize Israel as “Jewish state,” Palestinians are expected to participate in the dismantling of their own history…

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Some People Never Learn the Lesson
Gilad Atzmon, peacepalestine
On Thursday afternoon, Gordon Brown learned that he was to become only the second sitting British Prime Minister to be subject to a police investigation. This is happening less than six months after Tony Blair had left Downing Street under the severe cloud of a police probe into the Cash for Honours affair. For Blair it was No 1 Labour fundraiser, the Zionist Lord Levy who got him into serious trouble, for Brown it is Mr David Abrahams (in the photo, Abrahams is on the right, with an MP friend) , just another ‘Friend of Israel’ and a provincial chairman of Jewish Labour, who may be the one to finish off his political career….

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Forgetting to remember
With its decision to attend Holocaust memorial day, the Muslim Council of Britain seems to have failed to consider the plight of the Palestinians
Anas Altikriti
When the MCB leadership emerged from their meeting on Saturday with the news that they had decided to end their boycott of the Holocaust memorial day, I expected to hear that something significant had occurred that led to this shift in position. The decision not to accept the invitation of the organising committee over recent years has led to immense pressure and often censure from a variety of sources, including the government, as well as a barrage of attacks from the media brigade, along with the much-used accusations of antisemitism and extremism. In essence the price paid by the MCB and its affiliates for its previous principled stand was dear on all fronts, although it gained much unnoticed and unreported praise from an array of sectors. Added to this, a recent internal survey of its affiliates showed an overwhelming majority support for the MCB’s decision not to attend in previous years. However, if you were expecting something seismic to have occurred in order to reverse the decision, you were to be bitterly disappointed….

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Iran, US may meet on Iraq security in ‘few days’: Shiite leader
AFP
The fourth round of US-Iranian talks on curbing violence in Iraq may take place in the next few days, powerful Iraqi Shiite leader Abdel Aziz al-Hakim said Tuesday at the end of a US visit. Hakim, who met with US President George W. Bush last week, said the newly released US intelligence report saying Iran halted its nuclear bomb program in 2003 would help the dialogue between the two foes. “I suppose that Iraq should host in the coming few days this fourth round of the dialogue. We are seeking to see a constructive dialogue,” Hakim said at a news conference (…) The US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, and his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, are likely to represent their respective governments at the coming talks, Haitham Al-Husseini, a member of Hakim’s delegation, told AFP. “I think the ambassadors, of course, are going to participate,” he said….

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Basra women fear militants behind wave of killings
Reuters
Women in Iraq’s southern city of Basra are living in fear. More than 40 have been killed and their bodies dumped in the streets in the past five months for behavior deemed un-Islamic, the city’s police chief says. A warning scrawled in red on a wall threatens any woman who wears makeup or appears in public without an Islamic headscarf with dire punishment. “Whoever disobeys will be punished. God is our witness that we have conveyed this message,” it says. Women in the Shi’ite city are convinced hardline Islamic militants are behind the killings and say they fear going out without a headscarf. “Some women were killed with their children,” Basra police chief, Major-General Abdul-Jalil Khalaf, told Reuters. “One with a six-year-old child, another with an 11-year-old.” During the long rule of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi women in urban areas enjoyed some of the most casual dress codes in the Middle East….

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Tuesday: 1 US Soldier, 47 Iraqis Killed; 51 Iraqis Wounded
Margaret Griffis, Antiwar.com
At least 47 Iraqis were killed or found dead and 51 more were wounded. Kidnappers holding five Britons are threatening to kill one of them in 10 days unless British troops withdraw from Iraq. Also, congressional investigators from the U.S. have noted that ongoing violence in Iraq continues to overwhelm the security handover effort. And, one U.S. soldier was killed and two were wounded yesterday during an explosion in Anbar province. A suicide bomber killed eight people and wounded at least 30 at a police station in Jalawla. Among the dead were civilians, policemen and Kurdish troops….

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Ahmednejad and the Gulf
Marc Lynch, Abu Aardvark
The Iran news dominating the US press today is the revelation of the NIE findings that Iran froze its nuclear program in 2003. That’s obviously interesting and important. But – perhaps related, perhaps not – most Arab papers today are headlining the surprising and controversial performance of Iranian President Ahmednejad at the GCC Summit meeting in Doha – described in most as the first Iranian President to address the GCC since it was formed in 1981. This was not uncontroversial….

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Thank you to our Readers
Welcome to Baqa’a Refugee Camp
We are pleased to inform you that Welcome to Baqa’a Refugee Camp, was sent the following notification today from the Palestine Daily Voice. Welcome to Baqa’a Refugee Camp has been displayed as being in the “TOP 30 hottest blogs on Palestine” and we welcome this news greatly, in light of previous endorsement for our work from other major media outlets. We were also pleased, when in July 2007, we were contacted by a teachers trade union in the United States, who through the information provided on our site, was able to obtain sponsorship and go over to the kingdom of Jordan to learn more about the Palestinian refugee situation and their approaches to educating children in areas of conflict….

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Lebanon: Refugees Coerced to Return to Iraq
Human Rights Watch
Lebanese authorities arrest Iraqi refugees without valid visas and detain them indefinitely to coerce them to return to Iraq, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. “Iraqi refugees in Lebanon live in constant fear of arrest,” said Bill Frelick, refugee policy director for Human Rights Watch. “Refugees who are arrested face the prospect of rotting in jail indefinitely unless they agree to return to Iraq and face the dangers there.” The 66-page report, “Rot Here or Die There: Bleak Choices for Iraqi Refugees in Lebanon,” documents the Lebanese government’s failure to provide a legal status for Iraqi refugees in Lebanon and details the impact of this policy on the refugees’ lives….

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Iraq will suffer from cholera for two years -govt
Aseel Kami
Iraq will continue to suffer from cholera for the next two years until projects for providing sanitised water and a new sewage system are built, the Health Ministry said on Tuesday. “Since there is a defect in the infrastructure in providing sanitised water and in sewage, the problem of cholera will stay deep rooted,” Adel Abdullah, general inspector in the Health Ministry, told a news conference. “Within two years there are ambitious projects to provide all Baghdad’s districts with sanitised water in sufficient quantities and sewage projects. When these projects are complete, cholera will become history.”…

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IRAQ: Government to cut items from its free food handouts
IRIN News
From the beginning of 2008 the quantity of national food rations delivered freely to all Iraqi families will be further reduced – from 10 to five items, due to lack of government financial support, Trade Minister Abid Falah al-Soodani said on 3 December. The food rations’ system, known as the Public Distribution System (PDS), was set up in 1995 as part of the UN’s Oil-for-Food programme after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait 17 years ago. However, it has been crumbling since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 due to insecurity, poor management and corruption….

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Eating Iraq: Corruption Rules and Cholera Rises While Insurgents Surf the Surge
Chris Floyd , Empire Burlesque
In a remarkably short amount of time, the “conventional wisdom” of America’s media-political class has embraced the idea that George W. Bush’s escalation of the Iraq war in 2007 has been a “success.” This highly dubious notion — based on nothing but the fact that the horrific murder rate spawned by Bush’s act of aggression has momentarily abated to previous levels of savagery that were once considered catastrophic — now serves as the basic assumption of the “debate” about the Iraq war, especially among the punditry and out on the campaign trail. But on the ground in Iraq, where some good reporting still filters through the white noise machine of the corporate media, the picture is much different. Iraq is being eaten alive by the corruption of collaborators with the American occupation, by the relentless spead of disease and extreme privation — and of course, by continuing violence, including the increased use of civilian-slaughtering airstrikes by the “surging” American forces, and by “ethnic cleansing” and other brutal operations by terrorists and sectarian militias now in the pay of the Bush Administration….

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Iran’s Nuclear Gambit: A Timeline of Events
Stratfor
…The battle over Iran’s nuclear plans and the future of Iraq has not been an easy one. Stratfor has carefully monitored its development, and we have explained the intrinsic link between Tehran’s nuclear program and the U.S.-Iranian negotiations. Following is Stratfor’s account of the events that have shaped this process since the lead-up in 2002 to the Iraq war: * October 2002: As U.S. military intervention in Iraq seems increasingly inevitable, Iranian-U.S. back-channel meetings accelerate while Iran looks to extract political concessions from the United States over Iraq in return for its cooperation. With the aid of Ahmed Chalabi, Iran coaxes the United States into Iraq with intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. * January 2003: A top Iranian official says his country supports U.S. efforts to disarm Iraq. The announcement signals that Iran has implicitly approved a U.S. war, despite its concerns of U.S. military action spilling across its border….

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Kidnappers give Britain 10-day ultimatum to quit Iraq
Laith Abou-Ragheb AFP
The kidnappers of five Britons in Iraq threatened to kill one of their hostages in 10 days if Britain failed to pull out in footage aired by the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya news channel on Tuesday. The videotape which showed one of the hostages seized from a government building in Baghdad in May was swiftly condemned by London, which has kept its efforts to free the five under tight wraps and not even released their names…

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As fuel cutoff takes effect in Gaza, traffic stops, clinics cut back treatment
Saed Bannoura – IMEMC
Israel’s controversial decision to cut off fuel supplies to the Gaza Strip has come into effect, with the Palestinian population in Gaza unable to travel by car between locations in Gaza. The population is already prevented from traveling anywhere outside of Gaza, as Israeli forces have completely sealed the borders. In addition, many Palestinians who depend on gas for cooking fuel will be unable to cook with the cut-off in place. Israeli authorities ruled to cut off fuel supplies to Gaza as a response to several homemade shells that were fired by Palestinian resistance fighters across the closed border from Gaza into Israel. But many international, Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups have condemned the move as a form of collective punishment against the 1.3 million Palestinians living inside the closed borders of the Gaza Strip….

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Daily Violations of Palestinian Human Rights
the world have lost its mind – where is the compassion and the justice ?
Hiyam Noir, PalestineFreeVoice
On Monday In an unpredicted grace, the Egyptian authorities allowed a second group of 1,200 Hajj pilgrims from Gaza Strip into Egypt,to travel to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.The opening of the crossing into Egypt, came after pressure from the Hama’s-led Palestinian government in Gaza Strip.Hamas is negotiating with the Egyptian authorities and hope the rest of the Hajj pilgrims will be able to cross through the Egyptian border. Under the slogan “stop the systematic killing of the Palestinian people”,Palestinian medical crews marched on Tuesday in protest against the siege imposed on the Gaza Strip which have caused the death of many sick and seriously wounded,Palestinians….

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APPEAL FROM MINISTRY OF HEALTH – GAZA.
Felicity Arbuthnot
As Christmas approaches, the land of Christ’s birth – where, for believers, he walked, preached, encouraged his followers to be ‘fishers of men’, for goodness and justice and where he died at the hands of the greedy and corrupt – is under siege. The residents of Gaza are being collectively punished for supporting a democratically elected government (a process so beloved by the freedom-and-democrocy-spreaders-by-slaughter in Washington and Whitehall, but clearly the wrong kind of democrocy.They did not elect a corrupt quisling puppet.) The greedy and corrupt have been exiling and silently crucifying the Palestinian people for sixty years, in defiance of over forty UN resolutions. Aided, abbeted, armed with allegedly illegal weapons and weapons of mass destruction, by the bigest bully on the global block: the ‘land of the free’. Whilst people are jailed for holocaust denial, as the West witch hunts the very old under the banner of hunting Nazi war criminals, this silent sixty year holocaust, displacement, ghettoisation, home demolishing, infanticide, child killing, arrest without trial, disappearances, the dying of the sick at road blocks, the theft and erosion of ancient lands, olives and citrus groves, themdestruction of education, civil society continues unabated as the world watches on…

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Iraqis who fled to Syria face food shortages
Hannah Allam and Miret El Naggar, McClatchy Newspapers
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees in Syria face a bleak winter, with rising fuel costs that could leave many without enough money for food, the director of the World Food Program said Monday. About a third of Iraqi respondents in a recent United Nations study said they skipped one meal a day to feed their children. Nearly 60 percent said that they’re buying cheaper, less nutritious food to cope with a dramatic increase in prices. With the weather turning colder and heating prices rising, humanitarian workers predict more Iraqis will go hungry in order to keep up with rent and utilities….

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Popular committee warns: Eight water wells stopped operating in Gaza
Palestinian Information Center
The popular anti-sanctions committee warned that eight water wells stopped pumping in different districts of the Gaza Strip as a result of reducing the amount of fuel supplied by Israel. It appealed to the concerned international organizations and friends of the Palestinian people to intervene to save the Strip from a looming disaster. In a press release received by the PIC on Monday, the committee stated that the stop of these wells heralds environmental and human disaster in the Gaza Strip, noting that one of those pumps was used in dispensing sewage….

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Psychologists’ President Defends Psychologist Participation in Detainee Interrogations
The Facts be Damned!
STEPHEN SOLDZ
Last Friday American Psychological Association President, and Indiana University professor, Sharon Brehm discussed the APA’s policies supporting psychologist participation in national security interrogations with faculty and students at her university. The Indiana Daily Student has an account of the meeting.
While the entire article is well worth reading, a few of Dr. Brehm’s comments as cited there are especially worth commenting upon. Either they reflect an unacceptable level of ignorance of the basic facts about psychologists’ roles in American torture or they are simply willful falsehoods….

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U.S. soldiers shoot 4 Iraqi civilians, one killed
Reuters
U.S. soldiers mistakenly shot four Iraqi civilians, killing one, during operations against al Qaeda militants, the U.S. military said on Tuesday. U.S. soldiers had detained a suspected al Qaeda fighter in Tarmiya, 30 km (20 miles) north of Baghdad, on Monday when they were approached by a car that did not obey an order to stop. The car continued moving towards the soldiers despite two sets of warning shots. U.S. soldiers then fired on the car, hitting the four people inside. One of the passengers died while being taken to a military hospital for treatment….

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Gaza Strip hospitals face “humanitarian disaster”
Maan News
Hospitals in the Gaza Strip have been forced to shut down their emergency power generators, resulting in a looming “humanitarian disaster” due to Israel’s severe reductions in fuel supplies, said Muawiya Hassanein, the director of ambulance and emergency services in the Palestinian Health Ministry. “At nine in the morning, the major generator which supplies all the health facilities, medical storehouses, pharmacies and refrigerators for keeping vaccines stopped,” Hassanein explained. The power cut will result in the destruction of millions of dollars of crucial vaccines and food supplies….

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GI Special 5L3: Matched Pair [ December 4, 2007 ]
Thomas F. Barton
Baghdad is facing a ‘catastrophe’ with cases of cholera rising sharply in the past three weeks to more than 100, strengthening fears that poor sanitation and the imminent rainy season could create an epidemic.
The disease – spread by bacteria in contaminated water, which can result in rapid dehydration and death – threatens to blunt growing optimism in the Iraqi capital after a recent downturn in violence. Two boys in an orphanage have died and six other children were diagnosed with the disease, according to the Iraqi government. ‘We have a catastrophe in Baghdad,’ an official said.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) said 101 cases had been recorded in the city, making up 79 per cent of all new cases in Iraq.

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Israei army tortures teenager over false allegations
International Solidarity Movement
During the Israeli army’s latest crackdown on the residents of Azzoun village, undercover police abducted a youth of 16 years for extended interrogation interspersed with beating. The Azzoun teenager, Mahmoud Radouan, was riding in a friend’s donkey cart on road 55 just outside Izbat at Tabib, en route to the friend’s agricultural land in nearby An Nabi Elyas, when undercover police dressed in Palestinian civilian clothes and driving what appeared to be a Palestinian taxi stopped the two youths, pointing a handgun at them and forcing them to sit on the road beside the guardrail. After 30 minutes, Mahmoud’s friend was released but he was kept, the police reportedly telling him: “we have something on you; we know you make problems.”….

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Press Secretary Dana Perino: Spinning Lies for the Butcher of Baghdad
Walter C. Uhler
Every American of conscience should read Michael Massing’s latest article in the New York Review of Books. It’s titled, “Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs.” As Mr. Massing makes clear, the human costs of Bush’s butchery in Iraq have remained hidden largely because there are “limitations imposed by the political climate in which the [mainstream] press works.” Massing attributes the reluctance of editors and producers to print and broadcast news about Bush’s butchery in Iraq to the fact that “most Americans simply do not want to know too much about the acts being carried out in their name.”…

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A Hanukkah of light vs. a Hanukkah of darkness
Comment by Khalid Amayreh
Hanukkah is the Jewish holiday of light that recounts the Talmudic story of the Maccabees’ victory over the armies of King Antiochus IV. The story symbolizes the triumph of good over evil and light over darkness. This year, the celebration of Hanukkah coincides with a slow-motion genocide the legions of Zionism are carrying out against nearly 1.5 million helpless human beings in the Gaza Strip. According to human rights organizations, Gazans are dying in significant numbers as Israel continues to bar them from accessing food and work. Scores of patients have also succumbed to their illnesses thanks to Israel’s refusal to allow these unfortunate people to travel abroad or reach the West Bank to seek proper medical care. This week, the Israeli Supreme Court, a mere rubber stamp in the hands of the occupation army, authorized further cuts of fuel supplies and electricity to Gaza. This, coupled with the sinister policy of denying Gazans access to fresh food, vaccines, and clean water, is already having a disastrous impact on innocent people whose only crime is that 23 months ago, they elected a government that Israel didn’t like….

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Israel challenges US findings on nuclear Iran
Mark Tran, Guardian
Israel today publicly challenged the US intelligence consensus that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons programme, even as Tehran welcomed the US findings. Iran claimed its peaceful nuclear intentions were clear after a UN national intelligence estimate (NIE) concluded that Tehran had stopped its nuclear military programme in 2003. The Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, said he welcomed the US move to “correct” its previous assertions. Israel, however, contradicted the NIE findings. Its defence minister, Ehud Barak, claimed that Iran had restarted its military nuclear programme. “It’s apparently true that in 2003 Iran stopped pursuing its military nuclear programme for a time. But in our opinion, since then it has apparently continued that programme,” Barak told army radio…

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The shadowy role of Labour Friends of Israel
Such lobbyists and their back-room influence should make us very uneasy
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
Pardon me for asking. Perhaps I shouldn’t. For an easy life, some things, you learn, are best left unsaid. Nervous, am I? You bet. But these questions will not stand aside or lie down. They have been bothering me since the Labour party donor row broke last week. They are raised here in good faith. I have no wish to bring the wrath of Moses upon me and I can already hear the accusations of anti-Semitism because I dare to raise the question: Can someone explain what exactly is the role of the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) in our political life? And its twin, the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) too. In an open democracy, we are entitled to make such queries – indeed, it is a duty…

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Monday: 64 Iraqis Killed, 15 Wounded
Margaret Griffis, Antiwar.com
At least 64 Iraqis were killed or found dead and 15 more were wounded in the latest round of violence. No Coalition casualties were reported. Also, a British report admitted that British troops were unable to make Basra safe. A British parliamentary report admitted that British troops failed to make Basra safe. Despite a lack of regular news reports from the city, the report mentions that militias and corrupt police forces dominate the city. A lecturer at Basra University was shot dead at his home. Also, a middle school teacher was killed in front of his students….

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