Exchanging Organic Recipes…
Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues
A doctor adds: “ We have reached a catastrophic situation in Iraq where poor Iraqis sell their organs to survive, says a renal surgeon at Karama Hospital, requesting anonymity for security reasons. In one side we are happy to know that we are saving lives, however, it is hard to know that it is for money and not for love of fellow humans, he added. I was once forced to refuse to operate on a kid after I found out that the donor, a 12-years-old child, was being forced by his father who had sold his son’s kidney for $4,000 dollars. Local police have reported discovering many dead bodies lacking kidney or corneas. Investigations have shown that a mafia is working with help from some doctors who take out such organs from recently killed civilians… Such organs are taken out from Iraq for neighboring countries where they are sold for huge sums of money. A World Health Organization (WHO) official in Iraq pressed for punishing those marketing organs. But he admitted that a country like Iraq, which suffers a so serious security situation, can not possibly control such an issue.” Abu Ahmed a recent buyer explains “ They wanted to sell and I wanted to save my life. It was a good bargain and both of us left hospital with something to survive, a new kidney for me and money to feed his children.” During the sanction years it used to be oil for food, now it’s organic kidney for food in oil rich Iraq…

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60 years of Catastrophe, 90 years of Betrayal
Stuart Littlewood
The West’s leaders mark the Rogue State’s 60th birthday with a back-slapping show of friendship… but what are they so pleased about? Israel has ethnically cleansed and oppressed the Palestinian people for 60 years.Israel continues to occupy, rob, humiliate, threaten and slaughter its neighbours. Israel’s military occupation of Palestine is illegal under international law and breaches countless UN resolutions. Israel is no western-style democracy. It is hatefully racist. 8 Palestinians die for every Israeli; when it comes to children the kill-rate is 11 to 1. The Israel lobby has undue influence over many elected western politicians and government ministers, distorting foreign policy. Israel’s cheer-leaders kick up a fuss about one captured Israeli soldier while 9000 Palestinians, including women and children, languish in Israeli jails…

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Use of torture on 17-year-old boy by Israeli security service
Defence for Children Internatinal – Palestine Section
Early in 2008 a Palestinian teenager was arrested under suspicion of stone-throwing. When he would not confess to the crime, both his parents were arrested in an attempt to coerce an admission of guilt out of him. He was arrested and detained a second time two weeks later, during which he was beaten and tortured. DCI/PS strongly condemns the Israeli authorities’ treatment of Gheith, amounting to physical and psychological torture, and further denounces his arrest and detention as arbitrary and illegal….

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Siege Hits Palestinians Before They Are Born
Mohammed Omer
The Israeli siege of Gaza that has restricted access to food, water and medicine is now beginning to hit unborn children and newborn babies. “Many babies are born suffering from anaemia that they have inherited from their mothers,” Dr Salah al-Rantisi, head of the women’s health department at the Palestinian ministry of health in Gaza told IPS. And the mothers are becoming anaemic because they do not now get enough nutrition through pregnancy. That in turn happens because the Israeli blockade has choked the supply of food and medicines. Dr al-Rantisi also heads the women’s health unit at Nasser hospital, where about 30 to 40 children are born every day. Many suffer from anaemia, he says. Anwaar Abu Daqqa, 30, has lost three babies prematurely. The foetuses were malformed as a result of lack of nutrition and medicine for the mother, Dr al-Rantisi said. And in the last case she reached hospital late because she could not find transport…

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Mosul operation enters fourth day
Aljazeera.net
An operation against what Iraqi and US military officials call “al-Qaeda forces” in Mosul has entered its fourth day, amid claims that “indiscriminate arrests” are being conducted in the area. According to the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), at least 120 former Iraqi army officers have been arrested, as well as students and academics. The statement released on Wednesday by the AMS comes as Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, arrived in Mosul to “supervise the military operation”. Nizar Fahmy, a journalist working in Mosul, told Al Jazeera that the situation on the ground has deteriorated during the operation, to a degree where residents are struggling to obtain basic necessities. The city is under curfew, with only pedestrians allowed out onto the streets during the day…

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My pain in Human rights day
Mohammed, Last of Iraqis
…To be honest I laughed when I read the declaration in the UN site…I laughed a lot but the more I laugh the more I bleed…I was laughing on the way we are living and how should humans live, I was laughing on the new democracy and freedom, I was laughing on the idiots that without any shame or disgrace show up in the TV and speak about the new Iraq and how sacrifices must be done and Iraq will be a model and everyone should help each other to build the new Iraq…what new Iraq those rats are talking about? How could they build a country in this way? Do they really want to build it depending on a foundation of humiliation, violations, sectarianism and genocides they caused and carried on?…

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The Sadistic Side of Bush’s War on Terror
Sexual Terrorism
DAVID ROSEN
The “New York Times’” recently revealed the existence of a little-known executive order issued by President Bush in the summer of ’07 that permitted U.S. intelligence operatives to circumvent restrictions on the use of humiliating and degrading interrogation techniques. Bush’s order permitted U.S. intelligence operatives to effectively side-step the legal and moral restrictions imposed by the Supreme Court and Congress (and formally approved by Bush) as well as Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions….Much attention has been paid to water-boarding as an immoral if not illegal technique utilized in the so-called War of Terror. Little attention has been paid to the equally physically harmful and likely more long-term consequential technique of sexual humiliation and terror…

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ISRAEL’S INDEPENDENCE FROM WHOM?
Desertpeace
July 4th is Independence Day in the United States. A day when the country’s Fathers set fourth a Declaration of Independence… from British rule.India also declared its independence from British rule in 1947. Finland declared its independence from Russian rule in 1917. In the early part of the last century Mexico declared its independence from Spain. The list is endless…. country after country declaring themselves free from the grips of another…. On May 14th, 1948, the ‘People’s Council of the Land of Israel’ declared the following… ACCORDINGLY, WE, MEMBERS OF THE PEOPLE’S COUNCIL, REPRESENTATIVES OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF ERETZ-ISRAEL AND OF THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT, ARE HERE ASSEMBLED ON THE DAY OF THE TERMINATION OF THE BRITISH MANDATE OVER ERETZ-ISRAEL AND, BY VIRTUE OF OUR NATURAL AND HISTORIC RIGHT AND ON THE STRENGTH OF THE RESOLUTION OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY, HEREBY DECLARE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL. Termination of the British Mandate over Eretz- Israel (Land of Israel)??? What ‘Land of Israel’??? Whatever happened to ‘The Land of Palestine’???…

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Gaza lives being put at risk
Report, PCHR
As the grueling Gaza fuel crisis continues, so does the strain on local public transport services, including ambulances, across the Gaza Strip. Approximately 15 percent of local public services are operating across Gaza, whilst up to 90 percent of private cars remain off the roads, and all of Gaza’s 450 fuel stations remain closed. For ambulance drivers, the situation is particularly fraught, as demands for their services have soared over the last two months due to an almost complete lack of alternative transport to hospitals…

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Lebanon cancels anti-Hezbollah measures
Yara Bayoumy
Lebanon’s government cancelled measures on Wednesday that angered the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement and triggered the worst internal conflict since the country’s 1975-90 civil war. The U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said in a statement after a meeting that it was taking the step in line with a request by the Lebanese army to preserve civil peace and promote an Arab League mediation effort to end Lebanon’s 18-month-old political crisis….

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Sadr City Conditions Worsen
By an IWPR-trained reporter in Baghdad (ICR No. 258, 14-May-08)
Living conditions in Sadr City, already one of Baghdad’s most impoverished slums, have deteriorated sharply following weeks of fighting between Shia militiamen and United States-backed Iraqi troops that has killed hundreds, according to Iraqi lawmakers. “The situation has deteriorated significantly because most of the services have been stopped,” said Aliyah Nassif Jassim, a member of parliament from the Iraqia bloc, who recently visited the district as part of a parliamentary delegation. “Many civilian homes have been destroyed as a result of the air strikes and the military operations.”….

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Gaza: The children killed in a war the world doesn’t want to know about
Donald Macintyre
Nayef Abu Snaima says his 14-year-old cousin Jihad had been sitting on the edge of an olive grove talking animatedly to him about what he would do when he grew up when he was killed instantly by an Israeli shell. He says he clearly saw a bright flash next to the control tower of the disused Gaza international airport, occupied by Israeli forces after Cpl Gilad Shalit was seized by militants on 25 June. “I went two or three steps and the missile landed,” said Nayef, 24. “I thought I was dying. I shouted ‘La Ilaha Ila Allah’ [There is no God but Allah].”…

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A Shameless Barbarity
Torture: a Bully’s Creed
REZA FIYOUZAT
For the past seven years — and especially since those ghastly pictures from your friendly security providers at Baghram, Abu Ghuraib and Guantanamo concentration camps, showing prisoners’ dignity, rights and minds shredded to smithereens — continents of ink and keystrokes have had a go at this ‘controversial’ topic. Yet, few commentaries have shed any real enlightenment upon the subject…

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Al-Sadr movement reiterates commitment to Sadr city truce deal
Voices of Iraq
A spokesman for al-Sadr movement loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on Wednesday said his group would lay down their arms, abdiding by the deal they brokered with ruling Shiite Alliance. “Al-Sadr movement intends to lay down their arms on Thursday despite provocative measures undertaken by security forces in Sadr city and other areas, sowing seeds of mistrust among against the deal brokered with the government,” Sheikh Salh al-Ubaidi, spokesman for Sadr movement, told Aswat al-Iraq – Voices of Iraq – (VOI)…

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We are almost dead. We have no money, nothing’
Rory McCarthy, The Guardian
Her bed is on the third floor of Gaza’s Shifa hospital, where shafts of warm afternoon sunshine reach in from the window. The ward is crowded, and the bed on which Asma’a Abu Me’tiq lay is curtained off from the rest and surrounded by the blankets her sister-in-law uses when she sleeps on the floor next to her at night. It may be the best hospital in Gaza but even the poorest families, like the Abu Me’tiqs, must provide extra food themselves. Asma’a’s father, Ahmad, returns from downstairs with a cheap electric hot-plate, which he bought on credit from a shopkeeper he knows. He plugs it into the wall to heat a pot of thin homemade soup for his 13-year-old daughter, but there is either no electricity or the hot-plate didn’t work. “What bad luck,” he says quietly to himself. Then he reaches over to his daughter, who is coughing and struggling to breathe from the deep wound in her chest. She hasn’t touched her food since she was rushed to hospital 10 days earlier: the day an explosion in the street outside demolished the metal front door of their house as the family were eating breakfast, impaling her and her younger sister, Shaima, seven, with shrapnel and killing outright four other brothers and sisters and her mother too…

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New Israeli attacks on Gaza leave four people killed
Rami Almeghari – IMEMC
In a fresh new Israeli military escalation on the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, four people have been reportedly killed and few others wounded. Palestinian medical sources said that among those killed was a 17-year-old teen in the northern refugee camp of Jabalya, who was hit by tank fire. The sources added that three others, two in Jabalaya and a third in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis. A number of other people have been reportedly wounded during the Israeli army attack on the northern Jabalya camp, as two others were wounded in Khan Younis…

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Remembering 1948 and looking to the future
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada
This month Israel marks the 60th anniversary of its founding. But amidst the festivities including visits by international celebrities and politicians there is deep unease — Israel has skeletons in its closet that it has tried hard to hide, and anxieties about an uncertain future which make many Israelis question whether the state will celebrate an 80th birthday. Official Israel remains in complete denial that the birth it celebrates is inextricably linked with the near destruction of the vibrant Palestinian culture and society that had existed until then. It’s not an unfamiliar dilemma for settler states. The United States, where I live, has found that even the passage of centuries cannot absolve a nation from confronting the crimes committed at its founding…

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Ex-officials: Bush admin. ignored Iraq corruption
ANNE FLAHERTY, AP News
The Bush administration repeatedly ignored corruption at the highest levels within the Iraqi government and kept secret potentially embarrassing information so as not to undermine its relationship with Baghdad, according to two former State Department employees. Arthur Brennan, who briefly served in Baghdad as head of the department’s Office of Accountability and Transparency last year, and James Mattil, who worked as the chief of staff, told Senate Democrats on Monday that their office was understaffed and its warnings and recommendations ignored…

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Hamas Rejects Israel’s Truce Condition
IslamOnline.net & News Agencies
The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas rejected on Tuesday, May 13, Israeli conditions on an Egyptian-brokered truce proposal already accepted by Palestinian factions. “Whoever thinks that the (captured Israeli soldier Gilad) Shalit issue will be settled for free as part of the period of calm is completely wrong,” senior Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar said in a speech in Gaza City. Israel has linked the release of Shalit, taken prisoner by Palestinian factions in a June 2006 cross-border raid to swap for Palestinian detainees in Israeli jails, to accepting the Egyptian-brokered truce…

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In Spite of Truce, War Over Wall Goes on in Sadr City
MICHAEL R. GORDON, NYTimes
An Iraqi soldier was watching over the concrete wall on Monday when a .50-caliber round ripped into his head. Soon after the attack was reported on the tactical radio, two American military advisers were on their way to the scene, laser range finder in hand, to call in a Hellfire missile strike on a sniper position on the far side of a desolate no man’s land. This is the war over the wall. It is a daily battle of attrition waged over the large concrete barrier that the Americans have been building across Sadr City in the hope of establishing a safe zone in the southern tier of the Shiite enclave…

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New Israeli attacks on Gaza leave four people killed
Rami Almeghari – IMEMC
In a fresh new Israeli military escalation on the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, four people have been reportedly killed and few others wounded. Palestinian medical sources said that among those killed was a 17-year-old teen in the northern refugee camp of Jabalya, who was hit by tank fire. The sources added that three others, two in Jabalaya and a third in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis. A number of other people have been reportedly wounded during the Israeli army attack on the northern Jabalya camp, as two others were wounded in Khan Younis…

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