Depleted Uranium has Destroyed the Genetic Future of Iraq
markthshark, Daily Kos
It’s not just the U.S. military, and it’s not just Iraq. The U.K. has also used depleted uranium in both Iraq and Afghanistan; NATO forces have used it in Kosovo, and Israel allegedly used it in Lebanon and on the Palestinians. The use of depleted uranium (DU) munitions by the U.S. military may lead to a death toll far higher than that from the nuclear bombs dropped at the end of World War II. A waste product from the enrichment of uranium, DU, contains nearly one-third the radioactive isotopes of uranium that occurs naturally. DU is generally used in armor-piercing ammunition; despite its classification as a weapon of mass destruction, and subsequent banning by the United Nations….

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Devastation
Mohammed, Last of Iraqis
…I’ll apply for the Jordanian visa tomorrow and it will take a month but everyone says that my chances aren’t higher than 10% because most of the visas applications have been rejected, why would they give me a visa and they have returned me twice? If I couldn’t go to Jordan where could I go? Lebanon is the second gate for Iraqis but it’s so so expensive. If I’m assured that I can leave Iraq I’ll quit immediately but I’m not. If anyone can help with that please do it. I know the wisest thing to do is to leave Iraq as soon as possible because I had enough of this shit…If I live here another year I’ll end up either dead or suffering from serious mental illness. I’m so depressed, and I feel hopeless…I can’t see a way in which I can leave Iraq…Help me god, I’m suffering…if I stayed like this I’ll suffocate and die…

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Privatising war
Galal Nassar, Al-Ahram Weekly
…There are now more than 50 private security firms currently operating in Iraq and their number is likely to increase, according to recent reports. Officially their function is to protect vital facilities (from government buildings to oil wells) and important persons (the US ambassador, for example). Some of these companies have special information gathering and analysis departments whose staff has access to state-of-the-art military and security technologies. Global Risks is one such company. Charged with protecting Baghdad International Airport, it has hired for this purpose 500 Nepalese and 500 Fijian soldiers who are apparently the cheapest of the 30 nationalities of mercenaries currently in Iraq….

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Updating Yassin Aref’s Struggle for Justice
Stephen Lendman
Yassin Aref is an Iraqi Kurd and political prisoner in Police State America.
In the post-9/11 climate of fear, Aref was targeted for his faith and ethnicity and victimized by a willful FBI frame. It began as a sting to entrap him. Charges against him were baseless. No evidence supports them. Yet he was falsely arrested, accused, indicted, tried and convicted in October 2006. It was on 10 of 30 fraudulent counts in a kangaroo court proceeding….

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McClellan: Bush ’secrectly declassified’ 2002 NIE on Iraq to selectively leak to reporters.”
Think Progress
During his “Today” show appearance this morning with host Meredith Viera, former press secretary Scott McClellan confirmed that President Bush himself had authorized the leak of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq: MCCLELLAN: But the other defining moment was in early April 2006, when I learned that the President had secretly declassified the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq for the Vice President and Scooter Libby to anonymously disclose to reporters. And we had been out there talking about how seriously the President took the selective leaking of classified information. And here we were, learning that the President had authorized the very same thing we had criticized…

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Iraqi National Front to be announced soon – INL
Voices of Iraq
A leader from the Iraqi National List (INL) said on Friday that the Iraqi National Front (INF) would be announced soon, with the participation of some political figures inside and outside the parliament. “Some political figures expressed readiness to join the new front, including member of the Fadhila party, Nadim al-Jaberi, Head of the Arab bloc for the National Dialogue, Saleh al-Mutlaq, former Sadrists and member of a national association,” Usama al-Negiefi told Aswat al-Iraq – Voices of Iraq (VOI)…

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Eight Palestinians wounded during peaceful protest
Palestinian Information Center
Eight Palestinian were wounded, two of them seriously, when IOF troops manning the Sofa crossing opened fire at demonstrators protesting the siege, according to Palestinian medical sources in the southern Gaza Strip. Thousands of Gaza citizens joined the demonstration which was called for by the Hamas movement after the Friday prayers towards the Sofa crossing to the north east of the southern Gaza Strip district of Rafah. The peaceful demonstration by civilians is part of a popular campaign to pressure the Israeli occupation to lift the siege which has caused the death of tens of patients who were not allowed to seek medical treatment outside the strip in addition to causing a humanitarian crisis in the strip….

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Nahr al-Bared Camp: Writings on the Walls
afilmspalestine
This short film documents many racist, sexist, humiliating and insulting graffiti that Lebanese soldiers had written on the walls of the houses in the destroyed Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared. While many graffiti are directed against the non-Palestinian Islamist militant group Fatah al-Islam and its leader Shaker al-Abssi, others address the Palestinian refugees….

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Israeli Housing Minister to permit 1460 new housing units in East Jerusalem settlements
Saed Bannoura – IMEMC News
In another blatant violation of the promise made in Annapolis in September 2007 by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to halt settlement construction, the Israeli Housing Minister Ze’ev Boim announced Friday that he will be issuing permits for 1,460 new housing units in three Israeli settlements built on Palestinian land in East Jerusalem. The announcement came just days before the Israeli Prime Minister plans to visit Washington to report on the progress of the peace process…

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No Fulbright Grants for Gaza Students
IslamOnline.net & Newspapers
The United States has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in the Gaza Strip because of Israel’s crippling siege on the coastal enclave, home to 1.6 million Palestinians. “Now I am desperate,” Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor, told The New York Times on Friday, May 30. Abukwaik received a letter by e-mail from the US Consulate in Jerusalem that her Fulbright grant had been cancelled. The letter said the grant money had been “redirected” to students elsewhere out of concern the money would go to waste if the Gazan students were denied exit by Israel. Abdulrahman Abdullah, 30, was in shock when he received the letter…

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Former high-ranking Bush officials enjoy war profits
Tim Shorrock, Salon
Richard L. Armitage, who served from 2001 to 2005 as Deputy Secretary of State, was a rarity in the Bush administration: an official who delighted in talking to the press. Reporters loved him for his withering criticism of the neoconservative zealots around President George W. Bush and in part because he fed them tidbits about the White House they could obtain nowhere else. His accidental disclosure to conservative columnist Robert Novak that Valerie Plame, the wife of Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson, was working undercover for the Central Intelligence Agency remains one of the most notorious leaks of the Bush era…

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The Ministry of Prisoners
Iqbal Tamimi, Palestine Think Tank
In the UK, where I am living, there is a Ministry of Justice, but in Palestine, where my home country is, there is a Ministry of Prisoners. Does this make any sense? Well, it seems that it does, after all, states create Ministries to solve the problems affecting a large sector of their citizens. It is common sense to have a Ministry of Education because almost half of the country will be students at different levels, and many people work in the education system. This sector faces many obstacles that need to be resolved, and that’s why there is a ministry of Education in every country. But why is Palestine is the only country in the universe that has a Ministry of Prisoners?…

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IOF troops kill 70 year old Palestinian woman in the Gaza Strip
Palestinian Information Center
Palestinian citizen Yusra Abu Rook, 70, died at dawn Friday as a result of wounds she sustained when IOF troops opened fire during an incursion on Thursday evening into the Khuza’a town, east of Khan Younis city, Palestinian medical sources confirmed to the PIC correspondent. According to the sources, the elderly woman sustained fatal wounds in the chest when the invading Israeli occupation soldiers randomly shot at Palestinian civilians’ homes in the town…

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An Open Letter to Defense Minister, Ehud Barak
Here’s the Truth You’ve Been Running From
BASSAM ARAMIN
Honorable General Ehud Barak, you don’t know me personally. I am a seeker of peace, and I struggle with all my strength and ability for the realization of a just peace that will bring calm and prosperity to Palestinians and Israelis together. I have suffered personally from your criminal occupation and I have paid a heavy price. Firstly, I was imprisoned when I was 17 years old and wasted seven years of my life in your barbaric prisons. Secondly, have you perhaps read or heard about what happened to the young girl Abir Aramin? She was a ten-year-old whom your soldiers killed with a rubber bullet from a distance of 15 feet on January 16, 2007 in front of her eleven-year-old sister Areen. Despite this I, the father of Abir — may she rest in peace — believe in the right of the Israeli person, as in the right of all people, to exist and to live in peace and security. So why do you not believe in our right to enjoy these same things, sir? Where was the democratic nature of your state when your heroic soldiers killed my daughter before the eyes of her friends at the entrance to her school in Anata? …

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Marine says he was ordered to delete Iraq photos
CHELSEA J. CARTER, AP
A Marine who took pictures of Iraqi men, women and children killed by U.S. forces testified Thursday that he deleted the photos under an officer’s orders and later lied repeatedly to investigators about what happened to the images. The testimony by Staff Sgt. Justin Laughner came during the court-martial of 1st Lt. Andrew Grayson, who is accused of helping cover up the Nov. 19, 2005, killings in Haditha, Iraq. Laughner said he took the photos of the bodies hours after a roadside bomb hit a convoy, killing the driver of a Humvee and wounding two Marines…

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AMSI Condemns the Plan of the UN Representative in Iraq
The General Headquarters of the Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq (AMSI) in its statement condemned the purported plan of Staffan de Mistura the representative of the UN Secretary General in Iraq concerning the “disputed” areas in Iraq particularly Kirkuk. At the statement AMSI pointed out the history of the United Nations unfortunately have been filled with the decisions that harmed the Iraqis and caused much more injustice in Iraq….

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OLD OSLO ILLUSIONS
Khalid Amayreh, Desertpeace
Amid lavish settings and tight security, hundreds of investors and entrepreneurs from around the world last week gathered in the southern West Bank town of Bethlehem to discuss and plan joint business ventures.Palestinian Authority (PA) officials described the “Palestine Investment Conference” as a “mega event” in light of the large number of attendants, many of whom were businesspeople from expatriate Palestinian communities in the Gulf region. PA President Mahmoud Abbas opened the conference on Wednesday 21 May at the InterContinental Hotel with a brief speech in which he appealed to investors from the Arab world to invest in Palestine and in peace…

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Pain and Conscience
Charles Sullivan
…These destructive policies are formulated in the various branches of government and in the corporate board rooms of America. They are a prominent feature of the run amok presidency of George W. Bush, where they manifest themselves to the world. However, their history precedes Bush and his corporate gangsters by generations, and they are an outgrowth of the exploitive capital system. In some respects the presidency serves as a distraction from the machinations that are operating behind the scenes to spew forth one disastrous policy after another. With so much attention given to Bush, the people are failing to confront the root cause of which George W. Bush is but a single manifestation: the sociopolitical system that put the present criminal regime in power…

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European campaign accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza
Palestinian Information Center
The European campaign for the lifting of the siege on Gaza Strip has accused on Friday the Israeli occupation government of committing a genocide in the Strip, describing the Israeli siege on Gaza as the “harshest closure in modern history”. “The Israeli blockade and the closure of Gaza crossing points had inflicted negative repercussions on the Palestinian populace in Gaza Strip [where 1.5 million Palestinians are living], especially the children, as the siege paralyzed Gaza hospitals and rendered them without medicine pr medical equipments and machines”, warned Arafat Madi, the spokesman of the campaign in a press release in Brussels….

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Taliban capture Afghan district
Aljazeera.net
Taliban fighters have captured a remote district in central Afghanistan, taking prisoner the police and administration chiefs, officials and the Taliban have said. The fighters attacked the district of Rashidan in the central province of Ghazni in a night attack, the provincial governor and a Taliban spokesman told the AFP news agency on Friday. “Last night, Taliban attacked Rashidan district and it fell,” Jan Mohammad Mujahed, a provincial police chief, said. Mujahed said the plight of the seized officials was unknown. Zabihullah Mujahed, a spokesman for the Taliban, confirmed the fighters were in control and said the district chief, acting police chief and eight policemen had been taken prisoner. “They are alive and we have captured them. The district is totally under our control,” he said…

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