11/12/07

Torture and torment in 2007 AD
David Halpin*, Redress
…The “only democracy in the Middle East” has imprisoned at least 600,000 Palestinians since the ethnic cleansing of those native people started in 1948 en masse. Remember that the population was hardly a million to start with. Many are arrested at dead of night in a manner similar to that taught by Ord Wingate to the Zionist terrorist squads in the 1930s – the Special Night Squads (The Blood Never Dried: John Newsinger). British Mandate law is still invoked. Torture was very common and it is still practised widely. The mantra, “the war on terror”, was soon latched onto by Sharon. The Supreme Court of Israel has disallowed the use of “moderate physical pressure” but in 1999 the “ticking bomb” justification was acknowledged. Torture continues but in a less systematic manner….

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Bereaved Iraqi father thirsts for revenge
Death squads working in Iraqi police force continue committing murderers for no known reason.
Ammar Karim, Middle East Online
Since a death squad meted out a terrifying end to his football-crazy son in Baghdad two years ago, Abu Fuad has had only one thought in his mind — revenge. His beloved Fuad, 20, disappeared in October 2005 after responding to a mystery phone call. His father found his body 16 months later at a cemetery in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. He had been badly tortured and was horrifically disfigured. “I will never let the criminals escape even if I spend my life searching for them,” said 52-year-old Abu Fuad, who carries a faded picture of his son wherever he goes. “Someone telephoned my son, who was a football player in one of local teams, in mid-October 2005. My son left home — and never returned,” said Abu Fuad, an ordinary civil servant now caught up in the cycle of killings and revenge murders which has ravaged Iraq since the US invasion of 2003….

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MERRY CHRISTMAS BRAVE GAZA, FROM ‘WIMP’ BRITAIN
by STUART LITTLEWOOD, ON THE 59th ANNIVERSARY OF THE UNITED NATIONS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS.
Terrorist’ is such a handy word. The world’s bully-boys have twisted its meaning so that it cannot apply to them. But stand with your Kalashnikov in the way of US and Israeli aggression, or oppose their meddling in the affairs of others, and you’ll be automatically vilified and marginalised as a ‘terrorist’. So let’s see. What would you call a foreign power that occupies your country at the point of a gun, steals your land and water at the point of a gun, bulldozes your homes at the point of a gun, uproots your beautiful olive groves at the point of a gun, denies travel permits and sets up hundreds of armed checkpoints to disrupt normal life, batters down villagers’ front doors in the dead of night at the point of a gun and abducts your family, builds an illegal ‘apartheid’ wall to annex your territory and isolate your community, blockades exports and imports to cause economic ruin, and seals borders so that medical supplies cannot get in and critically ill patients cannot get out for life-saving treatment? Correct: a terrorist state. Between them the US and Israel are the greatest purveyors of terror on the planet but they fail to see themselves that way. It is the ill-equipped folk who resist, and who fight for their freedom with unconventional means, that are branded terrorists and suffer sanctions. Take the resistance movement Hamas. The British government, faithful cur, has had it drum! med into its collective brain, by our ‘allies’, that this is a terror organisation. Therefore our chaps are forbidden to drop in for coffee and a natter with Hamas’s chaps even though they are the democratically elected, legitimate choice of the Palestinian people….

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Internet Yellow Pages Collects Your Money for Zionist Occupation
Sabbah’s blog
The following is some information that I have found concerning something that is going on which should concern everyone who is troubled by misinformation, trickery, and support of brutal Israeli/Zionist policies. A few weeks ago while “surfing” the internet, I came across an article which had JUST hit the internet that morning, YELLOWPAGES.travel & SearchBoth.com Officially Launch Their Muslim Heritage Program (…) When I linked to the video (which has since been taken down) I was absolutely shocked to see the misinformation contained there. This supposed “Muslim Heritage” video contained pictures of many Arab Americans and others, but almost none of them were Muslim (…) Now, guess where I found that link to the video? None other than some of the most infamous Zionist blogs: Dhimmi Watch whose co-founder is Hugh Fitzgerald! And who else? Well, we have HotAir with another post knocking this video, another one here and last but not least, the master of this Zionists’ gang, Little Green Footballs with a post: “Yellow Pages Schills for Islam, Claims Zappa Was a Muslim”…But the story does not end here. The best part is coming yet….

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FREE GAZA! Gaza Makes an Appeal to YOU
Ramy Abdu, Popular Committee Against Siege
About 60 years have passed since our Palestinian catastrophe (Nakba). Palestinian people have passed through and tasted several sufferings and calamities, and the Gaza Strip, which includes about 1.5 million people, 75% of them refugees, got a big share of this suffering. By the start of the 2nd Intifada in 2000, Israeli Occupation violated all the taboos international conventions and has tortured Palestinians severely. In the meantime, the harsh siege imposed on the Gaza Strip has been continuing for the past seven months, but with more cruelty. The siege hinders the freedom movement for people and goods into and out of the Gaza Strip. Therefore, the humanitarian situation has severely deteriorated and the fragile Gaza economy is dying out. That economy was already weak due to Occupation procedures is now on its knees. Accordingly, the Gaza Strip has turned into a big “Ghetto”. All Gaza houses carry stories of pain and suffering!…

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Human Rights Declaration and Israel’s violations
Mazin Qumsiyeh
Today is the International Human rights day that celebrates the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is a remarkable document initially drafted by a Jewish Frenchman (a universal humanist and non-Zionist) right after the atrocities of WWII. The document should constitute the real road map to peace (instead of the fake “road map” that Bush is pushing and that in 2218 words does not even mention “Human Rights” and “International Law”). I took the time to note very briefly Israel’s violations of just about every article of the declaration. For further documentation of these violations, readers can google for data from Israeli and International human rights organizations and International agencies (e.g. Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Physicians for human Rights, UN Human Rights Commission etc). My brief notes are in brackets below the articles of the Universal Declaration. Please note that many countries including the US and Israel adopted this document yet many violate it (to varying degrees). The reason we highlight Israel is because it gets billions of dollars of our tax money (the largest recipient of US foreign aid). Note also that Congress passed a law to prohibit aid to countries that persistently violate human rights and yet thanks to the Israeli-apologist lobby, we are not enforcing US law…

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Former Mossad head: ‘Israel must be in on US-Iran talks’
Journal of Turkish Weekly,
Highlighting new indications that the US government will directly engage with Iran in the near future on all issues including its nuclear program, former Mossad head Efraim Halevy said Tuesday that Israel must ensure that it is a direct participant in such contacts. Otherwise, he warned, the future of the region will be determined in a forum from which Israel is excluded. Interviewed by The Jerusalem Post, Halevy said he had no doubt that Iran was bent on attaining a nuclear weapons capability, but that it could and must be deterred (…) He noted that Iran “needs the dialogue” with the US and that “each side has to make concessions.” Acknowledging that what would amount to direct Israeli-Iranian negotiation seemed unlikely in the current regional atmosphere, he added, “The impossible happens twice a week in the Middle East.”…

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Christians in Basra told not to celebrate
LEILA FADEL AND ALI AL-BASRI, McClatchy Newspapers
The Christian archbishop of Basra on Tuesday canceled the celebration of Christmas in that southern city to protest the deaths of a brother and sister, both Christians, as bombings and mayhem struck at cities throughout Iraq. Archbishop Imad al-Banna said Christians in Basra should still pray to mark Christmas, but should forgo such celebratory trappings as trees, gift-swapping and family gatherings to protest the deaths of Maysoon Farid, a 30-year-old cashier at a local pharmacy, and her brother Osama, 33. The two were found dead Monday night, dumped in a neighborhood controlled by the Shiite Muslim Mahdi Army militia….

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IRAQ: Call for release of female detainees
IRIN News
Iraq’s parliamentary committee for women’s and children’s affairs has demanded the immediate release of female detainees in Iraqi and US-run prisons. “We call upon the Iraqi government and US-led forces to release immediately all female prisoners who have not been convicted,” member of parliament Nadira Habib, deputy head of the parliamentary committee, told IRIN in an interview on 9 December. “The Iraqi government should expedite reviewing the files of these detainees by forming committees of lawyers, judges and prosecutors, as the majority of them [female detainees] are innocents,” Nadira said…

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Follow the Leader: Halliburton Rape Case Reflects Bush Ethos
Chris Floyd, Empire
…The Bush Regime would not want to prosecute them good old Halliburton boys in any case; after all, they were only doing to this young woman what their paymasters on the Potomac have been doing to the entire country of Iraq year after year after year after year. Like the infamous guards at Abu Ghraib, like the American soldiers who raped, murdered and burned 15-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza, or the Bush-backed, American-armed Iraqi security forces who abducted and raped young Sabrine Al-Janabi, the Halliburton attackers were carrying out on a smaller scale the very essence, ethos and aim of George W. Bush, Richard B. Cheney, and all of their enablers in both parties, in the press, and throughout the American Establishment: the violent imposition of their barbaric desires….

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Hype and Musa Qala
The Fanonite
One of the reasons why I ignore most of the recent reports on Afghanistan is that most of them take every odd skirmish and try to pass them off as a victory for the occupation. This merely betrays a fundamental ignorance of guerrilla tactics on part of the reports, who lap up the US-NATO propaganda whole. The Afghan resistance is not fighting a conventional war; the imperatives of guerrilla war are never territorial. The success of guerrilla warfare is always predicated on the element of surprise and fluidity of motion. Holding territory is never its goal; it is instead to make it costly enough for the occupier either to seek accommodation, as the Afghan government recently have, or to withdraw, which US-NATO eventually will do…

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Iraqi Kurds for long term US presence in Iraq
Africasia, UK
A top Iraqi Kurdish leader on Tuesday said the Kurds want a deal with Washington that would protect their rights as well ensure long term American troops presence in the country. On his arrival from a visit to Washington, Omar Fatah, deputy prime minister of Iraq’s northern Kurdish government, said they want a “strategic agreement with the Americans” similar to the one between Washington and Baghdad signed last month. That was for a long-term economic and political agreement that would also keep American forces in Iraq beyond 2008….

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Algeria explosions and the American ambitions
Roads to Iraq
With todays’ explosions in Algeria, people should listen to two Algerians: Louisa Hanoun, leader of the Algerian Labour Party was interviewed on Aljazeera a month ago she said: The timing of the terrorist operations in Algeria and the emerge of the so-called “Al-Qaeda in North Africa” linked to the policy of the robbery and looting the region by some world’s super powers and foreign interests. Earlier this year, Hanoun was the first one to reveal that Algeria rejected an American proposal for an American military base in Algerian desert…

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On the Torturable and the Untorturable
Greg Grandin
The world is made up, as Captain Segura in Graham Greene’s 1958 novel Our Man in Havana put it, of two classes: the torturable and the untorturable. “There are people,” Segura explained, “who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea.” Then — so Greene thought — Catholics, particularly Latin American Catholics, were more torturable than Protestants. Now, of course, Muslims hold that distinction, victims of a globalized network of offshore and outsourced imprisonment coordinated by Washington and knitted together by secret flights, concentration camps, and black-site detention centers. The CIA’s deployment of Orwellian “Special Removal Units” to kidnap terror suspects in Europe, Canada, the Middle East, and elsewhere and the whisking of these “ghost prisoners” off to Third World countries to be tortured goes, today, by the term “extraordinary rendition,” a hauntingly apt phrase. “To render” means not just to hand over, but to extract the essence of a thing, as well as to hand out a verdict and “give in return or retribution” — good descriptions of what happens during torture sessions…

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PALESTINE SENTENCED TO DEATH
Desert Peace
The people of Palestine have been sentenced to death. There is no other way to describe the situation in Gaza today. Gaza, the forgotten area of Palestine, cut off from it’s brethren by joint declarations of the Israeli government and their partners in the Palestinian Authority. Gaza, the area of Palestine that had no representation at the Annapolis Conference. When we speak of the suffering in Gaza we are not speaking of a handful of people, we are speaking of almost a million and a half people. A million and a half people being collectively punished for not willing to give up their aspirations for a free and independent Palestine led by the Party that was duly elected to pave that path…

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Iraq’s Tareq Aziz suffered heart attack: son
AFP
Former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz suffered a heart attack last week in a US military prison in Iraq, his son said on Tuesday. “My father has not been hospitalised when he had a heart attack last week, and when he called us on Wednesday, we could hardly understand him,” Ziad Aziz told AFP in a telephone interview. “I hold the authorities at the prison responsible for his health condition, particularly that they have not charged him with any crime.” Aziz, 71, who also served as foreign minister under the regime of late President Saddam Hussein, is being detained at a camp outside Baghdad…

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Gaza attacks leaves 8 Palestinians dead and dozens injured including journalists and soldiers
Ghassan Bannoura – IMEMC
During the continuous Israeli military offensive in the Northern part of the Gaza strip, Palestinian sources reported that the death toll among Palestinians by Tuesday afternoon stands at 8 .Dozens of Palestinians were also injured including some journalists, while the Israeli army reported four Israeli soldiers were injured in two seperate incidents. Four Palestinian resistance fighters, from the Islamic Jihad faction , were killed on Tuesday morning when Israeli artillery shelled areas of Khan Younis and Rafah city, located in the southern Gaza Strip. Israeli ground forces invaded parts of Kahn Younis shortly after, Palestinian resistance fired RPG rockets at the invading forces injuring four soldiers, according to Israeli sources….

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Mowaffaq al-Rubaie: Iraq rejects permanent U.S. bases
Peter Graff, Reuters
Iraq will never allow the United States to have permanent military bases on its soil, the government’s national security adviser said, calling the issue a “red line” that cannot be crossed. “We need the United States in our war against terrorism, we need them to guard our border sometimes, we need them for economic support and we need them for diplomatic and political support,” Mowaffaq al-Rubaie said.

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Shi’ite factions proclaim truce in Iraq’s Basra
Aref Mohammed, Reuters
The Shi’ite factions that have feuded over control of Iraq’s southern oil hub Basra have proclaimed a truce, but the challenge will come soon when Britain hands responsibility for the province to Iraqi forces. The handover of security in Basra, expected next week, will be the biggest test yet of the Iraqi government’s ability to maintain order without relying on U.S. or British soldiers. U.S. and British forces have already handed eight of Iraq’s 18 provinces over to Iraqi control. But Basra, with Iraq’s second-largest city, only port and oil exports providing most of the government’s revenue, is a challenge of a different scale….

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Israeli calls for assassinating Haneyya and Hamas political leaders escalate
Palestinian Information Center
Senior members in the Israeli military echelon have recently escalated their calls for assassinating Hamas political leaders especially Ismail Haneyya, the premier of the PA caretaker government. General (Reserve) Dany Rothschild opined in an interview with the Israeli army radio that assassinating Haneyya would constitute a suitable response to the continued firing of locally made resistance missiles from the Gaza Strip. He said that Israel should target the decision-makers starting with Haneyya and not only the cells that are firing those crude rockets….

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U.S. Military in Command Changes in Iraq
ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer
The U.S. military in Iraq is undergoing its biggest changeover in senior commanders since Gen. David Petraeus launched a new counterinsurgency strategy nearly a year ago. The high-level shifts come at a particularly delicate stage in the war as U.S. troop levels begin to decline, Iraqis are handed more security responsibility and Petraeus seeks to ensure that the gains achieved over the past several months continue. The leadership changes are likely to be disruptive, at least for a brief period, as the new set of commanders – even those with Iraq experience – adjust to rapidly changing conditions….

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