Il Imperator hath spoken…
Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues
I don’t have time to transcript the whole of the Al-Arabiya interview with the puppet PM Al-Maliki. And besides, I can’t be bothered, he bores me to tears and his finger wagging reminds me of a drooling, salivating dog’s tail basking in the limelight of some “celebrity”. Puppets are usually comical and this one is no exception. Except what is happening to Iraq is not funny at all. But I will give you a summary of his garbage. And in no chronological order….

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Iraqi political leaders protest U.S. siege of Sadr City
Hussein Kadhim and Raviya H. Ismail | McClatchy Newspapers
About 50 leaders representing a variety of Iraqi political blocs took to Baghdad’s Sadr City on Sunday, a stronghold of fiery religious leader Muqtada al Sadr, to protest the U.S.-led siege of that area. The leaders promised to work together with Sadrists to remove insurgents and weapons in the area. But they also had six other demands of the government, including that it immediately suspend military activity in the city, supply basic services to residents and prioritize peaceful solutions over military conflicts. “Whatever point the crisis reaches we will keep our efforts to put an end to it,” said Ahmed Radhi, a member of the Iraqi Accordance Front, the largest Sunni Muslim bloc. Radhi said the leaders formed a committee to meet with Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki to solve problems plaguing Sadr City….

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US soldier acquitted of executing Iraqi
AFP
A US soldier charged with killing an Iraqi prisoner last year and placing a gun near the body to make it look like he was an insurgent has been acquitted of murder charges, legal sources said. Army Sergeant First Class Trey Corrales, 35, was found not guilty by a military jury of premeditated murder, ordering a fellow soldier to “finish off” the mortally wounded man and planting a weapon near his body. The 14-year army veteran, who had faced life in prison if found guilty, said he was going to be promoted to master sergeant and planned to return to duty in Iraq this autumn as part of the 25th Infantry Division’s 3rd Brigade…Prosecutors called the killing a case of cold-blooded murder, and said Corrales had told his elite scout platoon before boarding a helicopter that they were to kill all the “military-age” men they encountered in the raid on a home near the northern oil hub of Kirkuk on June 23 last year…

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Talks under way to end crisis in Baghdad’s Sadr City
Monsters and Critics
Political moves are under way to defuse the crisis between Iraq’s government and radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and to lift the blockade of Baghdad’s Sadr City, a Shiite lawmaker said Sunday. Iraqi member of parliament, Al Yasin, who is close to al-Sadr, told the local al-Sabah newspaper that moves were under way to contain the ongoing crisis peacefully. A meeting slated for this week between members of the al-Sadr Bloc in parliament and the cabinet’s executive council would discuss proposals to end the crisis, Yasin said….

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Iran condemns attack on Karzai
PRESS TV – IRAN
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mohammad Ali Hosseini, condemns a Taliban assassination plot against Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Hosseini criticized the attempt on the Afghan president’s life on the anniversary of the downfall of the communist government of Afghanistan in 1992. “The terrorist attempt on the occasion of the victory of the Muslim nation of Afghanistan only serves the aims of the enemies of peace and stability in the country,” he maintained….

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Israeli Ex-Soldiers Expose Abuse of Palestinians
In a report this week, 39 soldiers give eyewitness accounts from their patrols in and around the West Bank city of Hebron.
Ilene R. Prusher, The Christian Science Monitor
Doron Efrati was assigned to the Kfir Brigade, part of an infantry battalion that was especially created to serve in the West Bank following the outbreak of the second intifada. He figured if he was going to be drafted anyway, he would agree to serve in the Israeli-occupied territories, “to see what really happens, and maybe to change things,” he says. “But I didn’t succeed.” Today, he is one of 39 recently discharged soldiers whose testimonies are part of a grim new report on the situation in the West Bank city of Hebron, where the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) oversee a volatile population of 700 to 800 Jewish settlers living amid nearly 170,000 Palestinians. The 118-page report, which tells of systematic mistreatment of local Palestinians by both soldiers and settlers, was released during this week’s Passover holiday…

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Iraq mass graves yield 100 bodies
REUTERS
Iraqi security forces have found more than 100 bodies in two mass graves, military officials said on Sunday. Fifty bodies were found in a mass grave in central Iraq on Sunday, a military source in the area said, and another team said it had discovered more than 50 bodies in a grave south of Baghdad on April 17. The grave found on Sunday was in the village of al-Guba, 80 km (50 miles) north of Baghdad, in the troubled Diyala province, where al Qaeda Sunni Arab militants have regrouped after being driven out of other parts of the country….

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Response to a Comment.
Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues
…I’ve said it before and will repeat it again, NO ONE in the international scene amongst countries support the true IR who has foiled the Zionist American plan and has paralyzed it in the region. The Americans are bogged down in Iraq and Iran has been saved because of the IR. There is no doubt. But unfortunately and VERY SADLY, very few recognize openly and publicly the role of the IR in all of this.
Very sad indeed. Long Live Iraq and Long live the valiant and glorious Iraqi Resistance…

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Baath Party Statement
A statement to our resisting people’ sons and daughters on the seventy first birth anniversary of the modern martyrs’ masters Leader Saddam Hussein
The Arab Baath Socialist Party Baghdad
We celebrate today the seventy first birth anniversary of the great al Hadj martyr, leader Mujahid Saddam Hussein, may the Lord have mercy upon his blessed soul for he was born in this day in 1937 while the Arab nation was enduring her renaissance’ labor with the birth of the Baath thought made evident through the works and the writings of the Comrade leader founder Ahmad Michel Aflak, may the Lord have mercy upon him, since 1933 and until the official announcement of the Party’s birth, in its first founding Congress on seventh of April 1947…

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Arab League: Fuel crisis deprived a million Palestinian from relief aid
Palestinian Information Center
The Arab League warned Saturday that the forced suspension of UNRWA’s relief operations in Gaza as a result of the fuel crisis caused by Israel had deprived about one million Palestinians from humanitarian aid, considering it an alarm bell portending further deterioration of a situation already catastrophic. In a statement, Hisham Yousef, the spokesman for the Arab League, underlined that the new circumstances in addition to the ongoing Israeli military attacks on the Palestinians in Gaza herald an unprecedented humanitarian disaster…

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The “Syrian Reactor Show” – a Fake?
Moon of Alabama
The “video”, a slideshow of text, computer animations and photos alleged to be from a Syria nuclear reactor, has been released. The presentation has, as David Sanger in the NYT characterizes, “the feel of a cold-war-era newsreel about the Korean War.” There are some inconsistencies in the presentation, at least for me, and I’ll discuss those along with pictures below the fold. The presentation is an elaborate information operation. If one sees it only once and is not really concentrated it is even convincing. But if you analyze it you will find that it jumps in time and space and adds stuff in animations and graphics that are not supported in the photographed evidence…

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Pictures From the CIA “Syrian Reactor” Show
Moon of Alabama
These are screenshots taken from a slideshow presented to congress. A McClatchy piece explains the issue. For comparison first four aerial pictures released (pdf) by David Albright’s ISIS, which are suposed to show the “Box-on-the Euphrates” in Syria which allegedly Israel bombed last September…

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Hamas: Arab and Egypt’s national security is a red line
Palestinian Information Center
The Hamas Movement categorically denied that it planned to carry out an operation threatening Egypt’s national security, highlighting that the national security of Egypt and Arab countries is a red line that cannot be overstepped. In a press release, Mohamed Nasr, a member of the Hamas political bureau, accused parties described as “hostile” to the Palestinians, Arabs and Egypt of working on driving a wedge between Hamas and Cairo by spreading such fabrications….

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Baghdad Green Zone blasted under cover of storm
Wisam Mohammed and Peter Graff
Militants bombarded Baghdad’s Green Zone with rockets on Sunday, taking advantage of the cover of a blinding dust storm to launch one of the heaviest strikes in weeks on the fortified compound.Reuters correspondents heard the missiles whistling overhead and exploding inside the heavily fortified government and diplomatic compound on the west side of the Tigris River. Sirens wailed, ordering people to take cover. Iraqi police said eight missiles or mortars had hit the Green Zone and another 14 fell in other parts of the Iraqi capital, killing two people and wounding 20…

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MOST ISRAELIS ARE TOO EMBARRASSED TO LOOK THEMSELVES IN THE EYE
Desertpeace
Certain things are not talked about among Jews, diseases in particular. If a loved one gets ill he is wished the best, wished long life and that’s it. The disease itself is never mentioned or talked about. The common attitude is that it will eventually go away and all will be well. It seems that the cancer of zionism is thought of in that same light, you don’t hear it discussed much, it’s hardly mentioned. In years gone by every car in Jerusalem had a small Israeli flag attached to the window in celebration of the day of Independence. This year is a big one… but hardly a flag in sight. Municipalities have put up signs and lights on all major roads… but nothing from the people themselves…

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Hamid Karzai escapes as Taleban target military parade
Nick Meo, Times
President Hamid Karzai escaped a dramatic attempt on his life today when Taleban fighters opened fire with automatic weapons and rockets during a military parade in Kabul. The President, Afghan MPs and foreign dignitaries including the British Ambassador had to scramble for cover when they came under fire at the end of a 21-gun salute to mark the downfall of the communist government in 1992, Afghanistan’s most important state occasion….

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Israel Might Have Many More Spies Here, Officials Say
Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor
The elderly New Jersey man arrested last week on charges of spying for Israel years ago was probably still working for the Jewish state’s espionage service in tandem with another, as yet unidentified spy, former American intelligence officials say. Ben-Ami Kadish, now 84, was employed as a mechanical engineer at a U.S. Army weapons center in New Jersey when he allegedly supplied his Israeli handler with classified military documents, according to charges filed last week. The handler was named only as “CC-1,” or co-conspirator 1, in the criminal complaint. But its description of him as the same man who was handling the notorious Israeli mole Jonathan Pollard all but identified him as Yosef Yagur, formerly the consul for scientific affairs at the Israeli consulate in New York…

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Remembering the past
Azmi Bishara, Al-Ahram Weekly
…It takes more than seminars and conferences to resurrect ways of thinking. Renovation is a process undertaken by individuals at the intersection between the needs imposed by the socio-historical process and the course of the history of ideas. One of the most pressing needs is for thinkers of the type that embraced the concept of the “Arab idea” and who made their mark in the first half of the 20th century. Conferences and seminars will not produce them, just as they will fail to produce any other kinds of innovative thinkers. Ultimately the task of renewal falls upon the individual who must engage in a creative intellectual process…

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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Saturday, 26 April 2008
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. www.freearabvoice.org
…In a dispatch posted on its Arabic website at 5:51pm Saturday afternoon Beijing time (1:51pm in Baghdad), the Xinhua News Agency reported that a bomb exploded by an Iraqi army patrol in the al-Wajihiyah area near al-Miqdadiyah, 85km north of Baghdad….In a dispatch posted at 10:26pm Baghdad time Saturday night, the Yaqen News Agency reported that a car bomb exploded by a police patrol crossing the Fifth Bridge to the east of al-Mawsil on Saturday. Yaqen reported that the blast killed four policemen and wounded three more of them…

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Al-Sadr rejects government terms for end to crackdown against Mahdi militia
The Associated Press
Muqtada al-Sadr has rejected conditions set by Iraq’s prime minister for stopping the military crackdown against his Mahdi Army militia. An al-Sadr spokesman accused Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of wanting to resolve the problem by force instead of dialogue. Last week, al-Maliki set four conditions for stopping the campaign. He said the groups must hand over heavy weapons and stop interfering in politics and the security forces. He also demanded they hand over all wanted people….

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April 26, 2008: 53 Iraqis Killed, 148 Wounded
Margaret Griffis, Antiwar.com
At least 53 Iraqis were killed and 148 more were wounded in the latest security incidents. Several suicide bombings took place in the Mosul area. Meanwhile, Turkish air forces bombed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) locations in northern Iraq, but no casualties were reported. No Coalition deaths were announced either…

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