Saddam Provided More Food Than the U.S.
Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail*
The Iraqi government announcement that monthly food rations will be cut by half has left many Iraqis asking how they can survive. The government also wants to reduce the number of people depending on the rationing system by five million by June 2008. Iraq’s food rations system was introduced by the Saddam Hussein government in 1991 in response to the UN economic sanctions. Families were allotted basic foodstuffs monthly because the Iraqi Dinar and the economy collapsed. The sanctions, imposed after Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion of Kuwait, were described as “genocidal” by Denis Halliday, then UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq. Halliday quit his post in protest against the U.S.-backed sanctions. The sanctions killed half a million Iraqi children, and as many adults, according to the UN. They brought malnutrition, disease, and lack of medicines. Iraqis became nearly completely reliant on food rations for survival. The programme has continued into the U.S.-led occupation. But now the U.S.-backed Iraqi government has announced it will halve the essential items in the ration because of “insufficient funds and spiralling inflation.”…

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Militias stronger than police in Basra, police chief says
Abed Battat, Azzaman
The police forces charged with security in Basra are no match to the heavily armed militia groups in the southern city, Basra’s police chief said. Lt. Gen. Jaleel al-Shuwaili said the militias administered the main ports and terminals in the province of which Basra is the capital and that his forces were incapable of reinstating law and order. Running Basra’s ports, which include terminals from which most of the country’s oil is loaded for exports, has turned into the life-line for the disparate militia groups in the city….

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Protest Against Israeli Racism
Sabbah’s blog
Residents of a number of villages in the Ramallah area organized a protest joined by a number of International and Israeli peace activists at Highway 443, on Friday after the noon prayer. Protesters carried anti-racism signs and Palestinian flags, and demanded that the Israeli authorities allow them to use this road that passes through the villagers’ land. Troops installed barbed wire in an attempt to prevent the protesters from reaching the highway. However, the villagers insisted and managed to reach the road. Troops fired several rounds of rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas at the protesters, however no injuries were reported. For seven years in a row, Israel prohibits Palestinians from using this 200-mile road which is built on the land of Palestinian villages, and allows only Jewish settlers to use it…
This is Israeli racism at its finest.

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Another massacre of civilians by NATO forces in Afghanistan
Prof. Marc W. Herold, The Afghan Victim Memorial Project
On December 23-26, 2007 in Dosang and Doab, district of Char Chino, in central Uruzgan Province, U.S., Dutch and Afghan forces launched a large clearing operation. The U.S. propaganda machine in Kabul said “…early this week so far 150 rebels have been killed.” The Taliban according to the Afghan Islamic Press reported 50 civilians being killed….

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“I Want to Live”: Israeli Authorities Deny Dying Young Cancer Patient Access to Care
Mohammed Omer
Frail, a mere ghost of a youth, 20-year-old Mahmoud Abu Taha lay listlessly in a Gaza hospital room, nurses helpless to assist. The strain of his illness and uncertain future was etched on the faces of his family members who surrounded his bed. Diagnosed with colon cancer earlier this year, the young man’s life had been taken over by the disease. Merely raising his head or speaking required all his energy. “It hurts,” he whispered when asked how he’s doing. “I feel pain in every part of my body.” Having lost one-third of his body weight in the months since his diagnosis, Abu Taha was unable to walk or stand. The lack of vitamins, essential nutrients and medications in Gaza due to the closure of its borders meant that even the most basic treatments are unavailable to him….

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The right to explode in anger
Amira Hass, Ha’aretz
..In the internal negotiations, Israelis are willing to oppose the outposts a little bit because they were built mainly on “private lands.” In other words, all the settlements that were built on non-private lands are kosher. And Area C, after all [the part of the West Bank under exclusive Israeli security control and administrative control according to the Oslo Accords], is filled with such non-private lands; why not build for Jews there? It seems that in the intra-Israeli negotiations the size of the enclaves of the prospective Palestinian state overlap more and more with the land registered as privately owned with the Civil Administration. In the intra-Israeli negotiations, the boundaries of the concessions over Jerusalem have also been drawn: After Israel took most of the available, unoccupied land of the Palestinian villages and neighborhoods to prevent them from expanding and to create its own settlements – called neighborhoods – Israel agreed to relinquish the residents. The land to us, the people to the Palestinian Authority. And the world will glorify Israel for its willingness to compromise and tear from its heart holy parts such as Anata and Kafr A’qab….

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Wars Cost $15 Billion a Month, GOP Senator Says
Walter Pincus, Washington Post Staff Writer
The latest estimate of the growing costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the worldwide battle against terrorism — nearly $15 billion a month — came last week from one of the Senate’s leading proponents of a continued U.S. military presence in Iraq. “This cost of this war is approaching $15 billion a month, with the Army spending $4.2 billion of that every month,” Sen. Ted Stevens (Alaska), the ranking Republican on the Appropriations defense subcommittee, said in a little-noticed floor speech Dec. 18. His remarks came in support of adding $70 billion to the omnibus fiscal 2008 spending legislation to pay for the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, as well as counterterrorism activities, for the six months from Oct. 1, 2007, through March 31 of next year….

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Hekmat Abu Halima, Gaza: “2007 was the worst year ever”
IRIN News
Sanctions imposed in the Gaza Strip in recent years, which reached a peak of severity following the Hamas takeover of the impoverished enclave in June, meant farmers could not export their goods, whilst on the domestic market prices plummeted because of over-supply. Forty-one-year-old Hekmat Abu Halima from Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza tells his story…

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Trouble is Double for Georgette Harb…Bring Georgette her afflicted family!
Popular Committee Against Siege(PCAS)
…Georgette Harb is the name of a young Palestinian woman in the Gaza strip. Her name is a little bit strange, her story is strange as well. We met Georgette who seemed to be exhausted and tired of her new tasks, the family’s sole breadwinner and she started narrating her story…In 1994, Georgette and her family reached Palestine after the Oslo peace agreement. “We lived in the outskirts in what a so-called rented flat, in Rafah, Gaza Strip. Our dream to have our house was finally achieved 3 years ago. Oh… what a dream but Israeli ghosts damaged that dream with no mercy. The 9th of June 2007, 6:00 a.m was a baleful day for us when Israeli armed soldiers backed by tanks stormed our house. My father and brothers fled the house with fear of enemy assault and aggression.” Said the panic stricken Georgette. Georgette and the rest of her siblings hid themselves in a bedroom, reckoning it was safe. Yet, the Israeli army was fast like the wind and demolished the external wall of that room. “Into the other room, let us move, hurry up…hurry up… Georgette told her siblings.” But sure enough the soldiers were waiting for the innocent family. Finally, we tried waving a white banner through to the soldiers as they sat inside on our garden. We were harmless ladies and children, no men and no guns with us…

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GI Special 5L21: The Blackhorse Prayer [ December 27, 2007 ]
Thomas F. Barton
I wonder if you’ve ever seen the attached ‘Blackhorse Prayer’, a rare antiwar protest from within the senior ranks in the field in Vietnam.
The author and distributor of the irreverent ‘prayer’ was Major Gordon Livingston, a fellow cadet at Jeff’s [Jeff Sharlet, Editor of Vietnam GI] military prep school.
Gordon Livingston was a West Point graduate, a psychiatrist, and in late ‘68 was posted to Col. Patton’s 11th Armored Cavalry deployed in I Corps as regimental surgeon.

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Christmas Under Hamas
Motasem Dalloul, IO Correspondent
Celebrating their first Christmas under the full control of Hamas, Christians in the besieged Gaza Strip denied any discrimination or oppression from their Islamist rulers. “We feel absolute freedom under the rule of Hamas,” Monsignor Manuel Musallam, the head of Gaza’s Roman Catholic community, told IslamOnline.net on Wednesday, December 26. “I have never received any complaint against them from Christians in Gaza at all.” (…) Attala lamented that Gaza Strip has turned into one big ghetto with all its houses, whether Muslim or Christian, filled with stories of pain and suffering. “We have no problems in our life as Christians because of Hamas. The origin of every catastrophe in Gaza is the occupation.” …

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The U.S. Army’s Intelligence Analysis of the 2004 Fallujah Attack
Fallujah, the Information War and U.S. Propaganda
STEPHEN SOLDZ
… New insights into the thinking of the U.S.military are available from a U.S. army intelligence analysis ? by the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center ? of the first Fallujah battle entitled Complex Environments: Battle of Fallujah I, April 2004 that was leaked this week on the Wikileaks web site. The first battle for Fallujah (the second, in November 2004, resulted in the city’s capture by occupation forces) began when images of four contractors being lynched from a bridge in the city. This new document confirms that the attack on Fallujah was designed to crush a symbol of resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq…

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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Thursday, 27 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 3:23pm Baghdad time Thursday afternoon, the Yaqen News Agency reported that Muhammad al-Haydari, Chairman of the Human Rights Committee in the puppet “Iraqi Parliament” announced that more than 70,000 Iraqis are being held by US occupation forces in prisons in occupied Iraq. Yaqen reported al-Haydari as saying that the prisons are closed and no one is allowed to visit the captives. Al-Haydari accused the US of committing numerous violations of the rights of the prisoners….

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Palestinian female detainee on hunger strike in protest to repeated administrative detention
Saed Bannoura – IMEMC News
Detainee Nour Al Hashlamoon started an open ended hunger strike on December 18 after the Ofer Israeli military court renewed her administrative detention for the sixth consecutive time without any charges pressed against her. Al Hashlamoon was kidnapped by the Israeli army on September 16 2006, and no charges were ever pressed against her since then. She is a mother of six children and is suffered from a kidney disease. Her husband, Mohammad, has also been under administrative detention since June 19, 2006….

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US prepares to increase occupation forces in Afghanistan
Joe Kay, WSWS
The Bush administration is preparing to significantly increase US troop levels in Afghanistan in an attempt to quell growing popular hostility to the US and NATO occupying forces. It is doing so with full confidence that it will face no significant opposition from the Democratic-controlled Congress. On the contrary, much of the criticism from leading Democrats of the administration’s conduct of the war in Iraq has been based on the charge that the US preoccupation with Iraq has diverted troops and resources from what they claim is the real center of the “war on terror”—namely, Afghanistan. Leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have pledged, if elected, to increase US troop levels in Afghanistan….

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The nationalist version of tribal mobilization
Arablinks
There was a brief reference to the Central Council of the Arab Tribes of Iraq in Al-Hayat last week, where the point was that one of the sources of GreenZone anxiety about the “awakenings” is the fact that they might serve as a vehicle, or an occasion, for the mobilization of pan-Iraqi nationalism, with anti-occupation implications. This has been overlooked in the Western accounts of the whole awakening phenomenon, which talk about GreenZone (and US military) anxiety about the awakenings only in its other form, which is—you guessed it!—the sectarian “Sunni versus Shiia” perspective. The more things change (in Iraq), the more they stay the same (in the Western accounts). Today Al-Hayat reports on another meeting of this tribal council, this one held in Damascus, and the journalist names a number of the participating tribal leaders with their regions of origin, noting that they included Shia and Sunni, from Anbar, Mosul, Basra and other regions, along with some religious leaders…

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Weekly Report: On Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory No. 50/2007 ( 13 – 26 Dec. 2007 )
PCHR – Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) Escalate Attacks against Palestinian Civilians and Property in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), Especially in the Gaza Strip:
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• 23 Palestinians, including one civilian, were killed by IOF in the Gaza Strip.
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• 10 of the victims were extra-judicially executed by IOF.
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• 8 of the victims were killed by IOF during an offensive on al-Musaddar village in the central Gaza Strip.
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• 32 Palestinians were wounded by the IOF gunfire in the Gaza Strip, and 9 persons, including an American human rights defender, were wounded by IOF in the West Bank.
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• IOF invaded al-Musaddar village in the central Gaza Strip
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• IOF razed 133 donums[1] of agricultural land…..
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Benazir Bhutto killed in attack at rally
Allegra Stratton and agencies – Guardian
Pakistan was plunged into deeper political turmoil today after the assassination of the former prime minister and main opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, in a suicide attack. A gunman fired at Bhutto’s car as she climbed into it, said Rehman Malik, her security adviser. Bhutto was reported to have ducked but one bullet hit her in the neck and another in the chest. The gunman then blew himself up. Bhutto’s assassination was carried out minutes after she delivered a speech at an election rally in Rawalpindi, near the capital, Islamabad. It was her second in the city since she returned from exile three months ago….

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The Case for Talking to Tehran
Dr. Trita Parsi
…Momentum for broader diplomacy with Iran is clearly growing in the United States. Even prior to the release of the National Intelligence Estimate, Democratic presidential candidates began recognizing the American people’s exhaustion with the Bush administration’s policy toward Iran. Hawkish statements on Iran are being interpreted by the electorate as a continuation of a discredited neoconservative foreign policy outlook. A number of presidential hopefuls, including Democratic frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, have boldly declared their preference for unconditional talks with Tehran. This is unprecedented: Never before has Iran bashing carried so much political cost. Regionally, Arab states have sensed the pendulum swinging in Iran’s favor, while recognizing Washington’s inability to swing it back. Accordingly, they are carefully adjusting their positions on Tehran….

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US ‘kills 11 militants’ in Iraq
BBC News
US forces say they have killed an estimated 11 Shia militants in a raid in the town of Kut, south-east Iraq. The raid was said to have targeted members of a Shia group which has broken away from the Mehdi Army militia loyal to radical cleric Moqtada Sadr. Separately, the US military said it had captured two militants suspected of involvement in a kidnapping in May. It said it believed one of the suspects used his home to hide three abducted American soldiers…

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Iraqi govt. says Algiers Agreement still in force, seeks alternative
Voices of Iraq
An Iraqi presidential statement on Thursday said that the Iraqi-Iranian 1975 Algiers Accord is still in force, denying any intention by the government to cancel it, while an official spokesman said that the government is seeking an alternative to the agreement which “violates” Iraq’s sovereignty. “President Jalal al-Talabani’s improvised comments were not meant to cancel the Algiers Accord between Iraq and Iran,” read a presidential statement received by the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI)….

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