URUKNET CUT OFF FROM GOOGLE NEWS AGAIN!
Uruknet
Google is at it again! On April 24, 2008 Google has stopped indexing Uruknet.info as a news source. (The latest Uruknet article included in the Google News index is THE US POWER STRUCTURE Who Really Runs the World (April 24, 2008). We wrote to Google News but we didn’t get any reply. We therefore kindly request our readers to write to Google asking Uruknet.info to be reinstated as a news source. Please, send your complaints to google.news! Click here to fill a speedy form….

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The TAREK AZIZ’ TRIAL
and that of 7 other Iraqi leaders
Gilles Munier, AMITIES FRANCO – IRAKIENNES (France-Iraq friendship)
I learnt that the trial of the Iraqi Vice-President Tarek Aziz will start on Tuesday 29th April 2008. He will be brought to court with 7 other Iraqi leaders, including two of President Saddam Hussein’s half brothers, the Central bank’s director and a former Finance’ minister. While no charges were established against him since his detention in April 2003 by the US troops, he is suddenly accused to have participated in 1992 – in the decision to hang 42 Iraqi merchants sentenced to death for having increased the price of the food products when the population was suffering from the international embargo. When remembering these events occured during one of my stays in Iraq, I want to precise that commerce didn’t fall within the competencies of Tarek Aziz and the order to execute the sentence was not taken at his level. The ‘court’ being presided by judge Raouf Abdul-Rahman, who condemned President Saddam Hussein to death in 2006, we must be ready for a mockery of trial followed by summary executions…

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CIA Stonewall: Agency Won’t Release 7,000 Documents Related to Torture Program
Tom Burghardt
After identifying some 7,000 pages of classified memos, e-mails and other records relating to its forced disappearance, secret detention and torture program, the Central Intelligence Agency has refused to release the documents. Responding to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed last June in federal district court in New York by Amnesty International USA (AIUSA), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the International Human Rights Clinic at NYU School of Law (NYU IHRC), the CIA has filed a motion for summary judgement (dismissal) to avoid turning over the files….

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Fastened To A Dying Animal: a short jeremiad regarding that affront to the nation’s dignity known as the US election process
Phil Rockstroh
…Here, now, sprawled upon the detritus of our dignity, we are confronted by the exponential dynamics of decay known as the US Presidential Election cycle. In this, all three corporate candidates are of little use to us. Although all three have done very well for themselves by the present and prevailing arrangement known as Disaster Capitalism. What motivation do they have to change the system by which they’ve thrived? McCain, Clinton, and Obama must serve the interests of the corrupt corporate class — or else they would be marginalized. Paradoxically, as we have witnessed, as of late, if they make even the most minute rumblings to the contrary — as for example, blundering into a steaming pile of the obvious such as the observation that the battered laboring class of the nation might be embittered by their lot --- they risk political immolation by being labeled an elitist…

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The Torture Election
Chris Floyd , Empire Burlesque
…Torture is at the very heart of the Bush presidency, the most quintessential manifestation of its governing philosophy: a “Commander-in-Chief” state, where presidential directives can override any law in the name of “national security.” The use of torture demonstrates that not even the most heinous crimes — including techniques used by Nazi sadists and KGB brutes — are beyond the pale of the “unitary executive’s” arbitrary will. On the basis of this authoritarian power — established through a series of presidential orders and “legal” opinions by appointed lackeys — many other crimes can be “justified”: aggressive war; kidnapping and rendition; indefinite detention; secret prisons; warrantless surveillance; even the “extrajudicial killing” of people the president designates as terrorists or terrorist “suspects.”…

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Psychopaths always blame their victims
Twelfth Bough
I’m sure you haven’t heard on TV news that the IDF killed a Palestinian family of four small children and their mother, among others, as they were getting ready to eat breakfast. I mean, if an Israeli family was killed we’d be hearing about it non-stop; but this was just a Palestinian mother and her four little children. Just some collateral damage… The IDF is looking into the incident, but has yet to obtain a full picture of what happened. Military sources noted that a group of gunmen was spotted shortly after 8 am near Givati forces operating in the area. An aircraft fired at them and hit them, while tanks fired shells towards the area. Translation: The IDF has yet to prepare an adequate excuse for the utter disregard of Palestinian lives. They need an excuse suitable for international consumption because, though they don’t care about these people who were killed, they know that some people will whine about it causing a slight inconvenience to Israeli public relations activities. So the IDF is ‘looking into the incident, but has yet to obtain a full picture of what happened’, which means they haven’t got the story down yet…

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Syria says US reactor charges as fake as Iraq WMD claims
AFP
Syria said on Monday that US accusations it had been building a nuclear reactor until its destruction in an Israeli air raid last September were as bogus as American claims that Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction in 2003. The ruling Baath party’s mouthpiece daily compared the photographs of the bombed site shown to US congressmen last week to the images Washington presented to the UN Security Council as alleged evidence of Iraq’s non-conventional arsenal in the run-up to the US-led invasion. “When you look at these pictures… a single image comes to mind — that of US Secretary of State Colin Powell accusing Iraq of hiding weapons of mass destruction and presenting as proof a dossier of photographs,” Al-Baath said….

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Mourners mark Saddam Hussein’s 71st birthday
Associated Press
Dozens of children brought flowers to Saddam Hussein’s tomb in the village of Ouja to mark what would have been his 71st birthday, an eyewitness said Monday. Followers also recited verses from Quran at the burial place, an ornate building with a marble floor he built for religious events in this Tigris River village where he was born. Children also sang songs and danced in a ceremony held in memory of Saddam, said the witness who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisals…

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Green Scare State Terrorism
Stephen Lendman
In May 2005, FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism John Lewis told a Senate panel that ecoterrorism is “one of today’s most serious domestic terrorism threats.” Then the FBI’s James Jarboe estimated that two organizations (the Earth Liberation Front – ELF and Animal Liberation Front – ALF) committed over 600 criminal acts since 1996, causing over $43 million in damage. For his part, Lewis said both groups committed more than 1100 such acts since 1976, “conservatively” resulting in around $110 million in damages. What’s going on, and is there anything to these charges?…

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Occupation forces broke into the sewing work shop of the Islamic Charitable Society in Hebron warning the workers to evacuate in one day
Iqbal Tamimi
Occupation forces broke 26th of April 2008 into the sewing work shop owned by the Islamic Charitable Society in Hebron, warning the workers to evacuate it in one day, to implement the decision of transferring its ownership to the occupation and close it down. A number of the workers reported that the occupation forces broke into the workshop situated in the ground floor of the charitable orphan’s house in Alsalam Street, and informed the workers of the occupation’s decision that will be implemented on the 28th of April, closing the workshop for 3 years and confiscate all its contents….

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Video: Children killed in Israeli shelling – 28 Apr 08
AlJazeeraEnglish
Four siblings and their mother have been killed in an Israeli raid in Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza. An Israeli rocket came through the ceiling. The oldest child was just years old. Two other people were killed in the strike on the house. One was a boy passing by, on his way to school. The seventh person killed was a member of Islamic Jihad. David Chater’s report for Al Jazeera contains distressing images…

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Fierce clashes kill 38 in Baghdad’s Sadr City
AFP
Fierce clashes between Shiite militiamen and US and Iraqi forces in east Baghdad killed at least 38 people, the American military said on Monday, amid new political efforts to end the bloodletting. Sunday’s heaviest fighting in weeks came on a day when militiamen blasted Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone with rockets and mortars, taking advantage of a blinding dust storm that grounded US attack helicopters…

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IOF troops kill 7 Palestinians including a mother and her children
Palestinian Information Center
IOF troops on Monday killed seven Palestinians including a mother and her one-year-old baby while ten others were wounded when an IOF tank shell blasted their home in northern Gaza. Witnesses told PIC reporter that the IOF artillery shelled the house of Abu Muaitek family in Beit Hanun town completely destroying it and killing the mother and her four children Musab, 1, Hana, 3, Saleh, 4, and Rudaina, 6. They said that the shelling also killed the 17-year-old boy Ayub Attalla and Ibrahim Hajuj of the Quds Brigades, the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad Movement….

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The Bush team’s Geneva hypocrisy
Jason Leopold, Online Journal Contributing Writer
…The actions of the Bush administration also flouted the 1984 “Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment,” which was approved by 145 nations, including the United States. It declares that: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” Moreover, the convention says individuals who resort to torture cannot defend their actions by saying they were acting on orders from superiors and it mandates that torturers be prosecuted wherever they are found. The United States signed the Convention Against Torture in 1988 under President Ronald Reagan, who hailed it as “a significant step” in preventing torture, which he called “an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.”…

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Woman, child killed in attack on Baghdad’s Green Zone
DPA
A woman and a child were killed and four civilians injured Monday when mortar shells fell on central Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, police said. Several mortar shells fell on an entrance leading to the Green Zone in Karadat Mariam, causing the fatalities, unnamed police sources told the Voices of Iraq news agency. The Green Zone is an enclave on the west side of the Tigris River housing the US embassy and much of the Iraqi government….

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THE U.S. POWER STRUCTURE
Who Really Runs the World – Part Two
Malcom Lagauche
Frank’s Morrow’s specialty is the U.S. power structure. He gained his PhD from the University of Texas in 1984 and his 600+ page thesis was on the subject. He produced almost 600 segments of the two-decade run of the best political TV show in history, Alternative Views. This in-depth interview covers much ground and makes it clear that what we see in the U.S. political scene is not real. Frank goes into detail about how we have come to live in a unipolar world that is controlled by people who may not have names that are recognizable to the general public…

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Investigators: Millions in Iraq contracts never finished
HOPE YEN, Associated Press
Millions of dollars of lucrative Iraq reconstruction contracts were never finished because of excessive delays, poor performance or other factors, including failed projects that are being falsely described by the U.S. government as complete, federal investigators say. The audit released Sunday by Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, provides the latest snapshot of an uneven reconstruction effort that has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $100 billion. It also comes as several lawmakers have said they want the Iraqis to pick up more of the cost of reconstruction….

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West Bank farmers face ruin after trees uprooted
IRIN News
It was difficult for 87-year-old Jamil Khader to discover that nearly all of the 1,400 olive trees his extended family planted in February had suddenly gone missing, having been uprooted and stolen. “He became very ill when I told him. He was hospitalised and was in bed for a week,” his son Khalil, from the small town of Jeet in the northern West Bank, told IRIN. The family reckon that the trees were uprooted in March but they did not find out about it until 16 April, when they got to the land, which they do not do regularly because of its proximity to the nearby Israeli settlement of Kedumim…The family and aid workers blamed settlers from Kedumim for the missing trees. “There have been many violent incidents against Palestinians in that area of the West Bank,” said Emily Schaefer, a lawyer from the Israeli rights group Yesh Din, which specialises in such cases. “In the three years we have been operating, not a single [Israeli] was convicted for uprooting or damaging Palestinian olive trees,” she said…

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Helping the Mullahs, Hurting the Poor
Babak Rahimi, Antiwar.com
While the U.S. and many European countries believe that Iran’s nuclear ambitions can be restrained by increasing sanctions aimed at the regime’s decision-makers, Tehran continues to outwit them without changing its policies. The sanctions are not only failing to achieve their stated aims, they are also strengthening a government that has become more despotic since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq….

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April 27, 2008: 179 Iraqis Killed, 131 Wounded; Mass Graves Found
Margaret Griffis, Antiwar.com
At least 101 bodies were found in two separate mass graves. Another 78 people were killed or found dead, and 131 more were wounded in other violence. No Coalition deaths were reported. In political news, several dozen lawmakers from different blocs staged a sit-in, asking that the blockade of Sadr City and the military operations there be ended. Meanwhile, attempts at bringing boycotting Sunni politicians back into the Shi’ite-led government are underway….

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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Sunday, 27 April 2008
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. www.freearabvoice.org
…In a dispatch posted at 6:44pm Baghdad time Sunday afternoon, the Yaqen News Agency reported that at least 10 mortar shells were fired into the top-security US compound dubbed the “Green Zone”during a dust storm that swept through the Iraqi capital Sunday afternoon. Yaqen reported a source in the government police as saying that the storm grounded US aircraft, facilitating the barrage….

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