The Iraqi Rabita -League reveals crimes committed by the American occupation forces in conjunction with the Iraqi forces in Mosul
Iraqirabita
Warning – VERY GRAPHIC IMAGES.
In another round of American crimes against the people of Iraq, the information about to be provided , will show the extent of the American lawless hysteria and its total disregard for human lives. And will also show the criminal complicity of those who took the Americans as military and political allies and as friends and who provide to them their services — all conducted in the Green Zone. On the eve of Wenesday 11.7.2007, heavy fighting broke out in the Sheikh Fathi center in the Zanjilia district from unknown armed men. American helicopter planes rushed and some of these unknown armed men fired at the planes. The americans responded by using forbidden weapons and bombed the house of a Taha Al-Janbil, a Judge. All those who were in the house were immediately killed. We met the Judge Taha…

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Childrens’ Rights in the War Theater: Who Guards the Guards?
The US army has detained 2,400 children as young as ten years old since March 2003
Felicity Arbuthnot
…Neither Save the Children, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch or other agencies have been allowed in to the facilities where Iraqi children as young as ten are incarcerated in Iraq, under the oversight of Major General Douglas Stone, Deputy Commanding General Detainee Operations, Multi National Force-Iraq. The US army has detained 2,400 children as young as ten years old since March 2003, according to a 21st May 2008 Human Rights Watch statement (some estimates are higher.)…Given the horrifying behavior of the US military in Abu Ghraib and the lack of accessibility by outside agencies to detention facilities (the International Committee of the Red Cross confirm that they do have access, but their policy is not to disclose details of visits) transparent oversight is glaringly absent. Further there is only the assurance of this discredited military that just Camp Cropper near Baghdad airport and Camp Bucca in Basra are the only facilities holding children. There are numerous US prisons throughout Iraq, to find there were other disappeared children, in as yet unknown facilities, would be less than surprising. On 5th July 2004, ‘Report Mainz’, of the German TV station Sudwest-Rundfunk showed interviews with testimonies of those who affirmed not only seeing children in Abu Ghraib, but of a boy and twelve year old girl, terrified, as cold water and mud was thrown over them by per! sonnel, to persuade parents to co-operate with the authorities. The Kulturzeit programme of 3Sat also covered the subject, expressing concern that children were arrested and used to exert pressure on their parents. In August 2006, John Yoo, then deputy assistant to Attorney General John Ashcroft ‘publicly argued that there is no law that could prevent the President from ordering the torture of a child of a suspect in custody – including by crushing that child’s testicles…

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The insanity of Guantánamo
Despite U.S. claims of humane treatment, a new report reveals that prisoners — even some long ago cleared to leave — are spiraling into hallucinations, despair and suicide.
Jennifer Daskal and Stacy Sullivan, Salon
…In December, Belbacha reportedly tried to commit suicide and was moved to the mental health facility. He was stripped naked, dressed in a green plastic rip-proof suicide smock, and placed in an individual cell under constant monitoring —Guantánamo’s suicide watch. He says he was given absolutely nothing else in his cell — no toothbrush, no soap, no books, nothing he could somehow use to injure himself. Each morning a member of the mental health staff reportedly came by and asked the same set of questions: Do you want to hurt yourself? Do you want to hurt anyone else? Are you sleeping well? Are you eating well? Close to two months later, he apparently had answered all the questions correctly and was moved back to another windowless cell. More than half of the 270 detainees currently at Guantánamo — including many who are slated for release or transfer — are housed in high-security facilities akin to U.S. “supermax” prisons. They spend all but two hours a day in small cells with no natural light or fresh air. Their meals are slipped through a slot in the door, and they are given little more than a single book and the Koran to occupy their time….As a result, many detainee lawyers say, their clients are suffering from serious and even dangerous mental health problems. Several have tried! to comm it suicide, some of them multiple times. Others have reported having visions and hearing voices. Some show strong signs of depression and anxiety disorder….

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The Brutal, ‘Iraqi’ Education That Awaits John McCain
Len Hart
…This ‘war’ was lost before it was begun. Secondly, there is simply no yardstick or standard now or ever by which victory is determined or even recognized. Does victory consist of killing every Iraqi who disagrees with the naked aggression against his country? Does victory consist of brainwashing Iraqis into believing the same pack of lies that were, until recently, believed by brainwashed Americans? Does victory consist of Halliburton getting all the oil it wants, raising the price of oil to every American still dependent upon fossil fuel vehicles? Does victory consist of a ‘peace’ (read: occupation) that an American presence is required for 100, perhaps, as McCain has suggested, 10,000 years?…

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Blue sky, toxic sea
Nora Barrows-Friedman writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine
For the three days I’ve been in Gaza I’ve heard nothing but horror stories….Hospitals, grocery stores, butcheries, fishing boats, administrative centers, schools, factories, clinics, they all either run on generators or have been forced to quit operations altogether because of the fuel crisis. In the sewage treatment facilities, the fuel shortages mean that sewage plants can’t operate at full capacity — and remember, there are 1.5 million people here — so millions of gallons of raw sewage are being dumped into the sea, untreated, making the ocean extremely toxic. Giardia, dysentery, cholera — diseases not known just five miles up the beach, in the cities of historic Palestine (some call it Israel), where toilets flush and water is safe to drink, where people lay in the mid-day sun getting tan and drinking pina coladas and speaking a language resurrected just in the last hundred years, unknown to the indigenous and dispossessed here in Gaza — are now common. And once Palestinians get really sick, hospitals try to do all they can to alleviate the pain and eradicate the disease, but, as my friend told me, since the blockade began last summer, there are 95 medicines on the “blacklist” — prohibited from entering Gaza…

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Water crisis in Tel Rumeida
International Solidarity Movement
Water storage tanks mounted on the roof of every house are a distinctive sight throughout the length and breadth of Palestine. Without a guaranteed source of water, life is not possible in this beautiful, yet arid land. Since 1967, when it came under Israeli military occupation, the southern city of Hebron (Al Khalil) has been particularly affected by water shortage issues. These shortages and interruptions of domestic water supplies are invariably caused by direct military intervention. In the case of certain households (where the properties abut illegal Jewish settlements and are under particular threat of expropriation) supply is limited to two days per week. The luxuriant trees and lawns which are a feature of the nearby settlements are testament to their cheap and plentiful water supply…

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Fatima, 11, Afghanistan: “We left school to help feed our family”
IRIN News
Eleven-year-old Fatima and her nine-year-old brother, Ahmad, left school in Ghor Province, central-southern Afghanistan, to help feed their family. From dawn till dusk they scavenge for metal, bone and plastics from which they can earn about US$1 a day. Fatima told IRIN of the hardships she and her brother face: “Early in the morning it’s difficult to wake up because I feel pain in my legs and back. Ahmed has similar complaints….

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Future US forces in Iraq don’t threaten Iran: Pentagon
AFP
US forces which might remain in Iraq in the future after a general drawdown are not meant to be permanent and will not be used to attack Iran, a Pentagon official said Monday. “US forces in Iraq will not be used for offensive operations against any of Iraq’s neighbors,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said, speaking about the current talks between Washington and Baghdad over an ongoing US military presence in Iraq…

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Promoting Iraqi Occupation for “a Million Years”
McCain and the International Republican Institute
NIKOLAS KOZLOFF
Though Arizona Senator John McCain seldom talks about it, he has gotten much of his foreign policy experience working with a cloak and dagger operation called the International Republican Institute (IRI). Since 1993, McCain has served as Chair of the outfit, which is funded by the U.S. government and private money. The group, which receives tens of millions of taxpayer dollars each year, claims to promote democracy world-wide. On the surface at least, IRI seems to have a rather innocuous agenda including party building, media training, the organization of leadership trainings, dissemination of newsletters, and strengthening of civil society. The hottest country in which IRI currently operates is Iraq….

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The most reliable path to freedom
Omar Barghouti, The Electronic Intifada
“The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet but not to make them die of hunger,” said Dov Weissglas, Sharon’s closest advisor, a few years ago. Today, Israel is slowly choking occupied Gaza, indeed bringing its civilian population to the brink of starvation and a planned humanitarian catastrophe. If the US government is an obvious accomplice in financing, justifying and covering up Israel’s occupation and other forms of oppression, the European Union, Israel’s largest trade partner in the world, is not any less complicit in perpetuating Israel’s colonial oppression and special form of apartheid. At a time when Israel is cruelly besieging Gaza, collectively punishing 1.5 million Palestinian civilians, condemning them to devastation, and visiting imminent death upon hundreds of patients, prematurely born babies, and others, the EU is extending an invitation to Israel to open negotiations to join the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, instead of ending the EU-Israel association agreement due to Israel’s grave violation of its human rights clause…

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Zionist terror 1946 to 2001
Jerry Mazza, Online Journal Associate Editor
Why would we think that some portion of the Jewish people would not end as hardened by history as their oppressors? After all, they were a people who had been chased, derided, expelled through the centuries from country to country, only to land in the horrors of Nazi Germany, the camps, the ovens, the first industrial-strength genocide. In fact, as various Jews landed in the 1930s and ‘40s as refugees in Palestine, and while the Holocaust was in full bloom, sure enough the intensely Zionist Irgun, Stern Gang and Haganah terrorist gangs emerged there as well. In 1946, two years before the partitioning, as Israel was being birthed from Palestine, the Zionist terror bombing of the King David Hotel shook the Middle East. The brutal bombing was ordered by no less than Menachem Begin, who led the Irgun, and who one day would be Israel’s Prime Minister….

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Iran, Iraq sign defence cooperation pact
Reuters
Iran and Iraq have agreed to boost defence cooperation during a visit of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to Tehran, according to reports from Iran’s official IRNA news agency. IRNA says Iran’s Defence Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar signed a memorandum of understanding on defence cooperation with his Iraqi counterpart, Abdul Qader Jassim…

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Israeli settlers escalate their assaults and build new settlement in Al-Khalil
Palestinian Information Center
Several Palestinian local sources reported that Zionist settlers in complicity with the IOA escalated their racist assaults and settlement activities in Al-Khalil city, southern West Bank. The municipality of Al-Khalil city reported that a group of Zionist extremists uprooted Sunday 30-year-old ornamental trees from a garden near the Ibrahimi Mosque in the old town in the city. Khaled Al-Asili, the head of the municipality, stated in a press release received by the PIC that this act is a serious assault on the municipal property, adding if the IOA did not punish the assailants, more violations would be committed in the city…

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Chavez Revising, Not Revoking Venezuela’s New Intelligence Law
Stephen Lendman
Over the weekend, Chavez showed his mettle as a democratic leader. He acknowledged “errors” in the newly enacted Law on Intelligence and Counterintelligence and will fix them to assure it fully complies with Venezuela’s Constitution. He gave examples and cited Article 16 that cites the possibility of prison terms for persons not cooperating with intelligence services. It’s a “mistake,” said Chavez and “not a small (one).” The new intelligence services won’t oblige anyone to inform on others. Doing so is “overstepping,” and “I assume responsibility” for the error and will fix it….

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Baghdad to Remove Anti-Iran Statue
Fars News
Baghdad’s Mayor has announced a decision to remove a Saddam-era monument which once symbolized the animosity between Iran and Iraq. Mayor Saber al-Essawi said the city hall is to replace the ‘monument of hatred’ with a sign that would reflect ‘coexistence’. The statue in Baghdad’s Bab al-Moazzam district depicts a group of Iraqi fighters standing on a tank and aiming their guns towards Iraq’s eastern neighbor, Iran, press tv said…

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All you need to know about Shoes.
Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues
…You need to understand that in most Middle Eastern cultures, the shoe can be considered as an object of disrespect and or pollution/dirt. For instance, in traditional homes, you leave your shoe at the door before entering, just like in a mosque. In other instances, it is very shameful to sit and have your shoe pointing in someone’s face. I noticed Americans have this very ugly habit of putting their feet up with their shoes on their desks and the sole of their shoe stares at you. Most impolite really. But then American never had any manners. So building on this natural aversion to shoes, the shoe “concept” can be used when you want to insult someone or denigrate them….

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Security and long-presence agreement to connect the “Silk Road”
Roads to Iraq
..Al Zubaidi says, that virtually the treaty already signed and what is going on recently is just to ease the news on the people: To the Iraqi side, among the Iraqi political powers, signing the treaty becomes “de facto”, and everything taking place right now is to use more “make up” makes the treaty sounds acceptable. He also gives us the most logical explanation of why the U.S. very much interested to sign the treaty. Why the U.S. ambassador in Iraq Crocker donated five million dollar to Shiite flagellation ritual few days ago? And where this money went if two ago women police demonstrated about their low payment? Iraqis are well aware that the most important thing for the Americans is to link the Iraqi economy to the globalised U.S. economy, turned into the capitalist market economy, and even transform the Iraqi currency to the dollar, and this is what is being gradually done by reducing the price of the dollar against the Iraqi dinar to stabilize at 1000 dinars to one dollar…

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A village in its death throes
The bloody violence in Nilin showed me that Israel’s security wall could be the final blow in the destruction of Palestine
Seth Freedman, Guardian
Scrambling up the rock-strewn hillside in the baking midday sun, we stumbled across two middle-aged men taking shade under an olive tree. As they bade my guide “Salaam aleikum”, their eyes scanned my face for a hint of recognition. Finding none, one of the men ventured a tentative greeting in English and, when I responded in kind, proffered two items in my direction. One was a surgeon’s mask; the other a strip of alcohol-saturated prep pads: “You’ll need them for where you’re going”, he assured me. As we edged closer to our destination, it was clear we had been well advised. Plumes of tear gas criss-crossed the air, trailing the canisters fired by the border police towards the scores of demonstrators. The pungent, acrid fumes filled our nostrils and mouths, while our ears resonated to the sporadic bursts of rubber bullets being shot in our direction….

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Saying “I didn’t know” is no excuse anymore
Reham Alhelsi, Palestine Think Tank
A couple of days ago I read an article by Haitham Sabbah entitled Murder at Huwara Checkpoint. It talks about the killing of a 15 year old Palestinian boy by the Israeli soldiers at the Huwara Checkpoint. What drew my attention to the article was the accompanying photo. It was a painting of a Palestinian boy lying dead with stretched arms, an image that is a companion to many Palestinians. While reading the article my mind was moving faster than my eyes. Unfortunately, it was all so familiar; young people waiting to cross a military checkpoint, a rush of bullets coming without any warning, keeping the rest of the people away, preventing the medical teams from saving lives, waiting till the person lying on the ground bleeds to death and then the real “show” begins. The Israeli soldiers take off the dead Palestinian’s clothes, they wash off the pool of blood to remove any traces of their crimes, and then hurry and announce that they have just killed a terrorist who intended to blow himself up. The sad thing is, this scenario has been taking place for decades now and the world still believes these lies and very few dare to question them, despite the existence of witnesses and proof to contradict these lies…

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June 8, 2008: 2 US Soldiers, 28 Iraqis Killed; 18 Americans, 58 Iraqis Wounded
Margaret Griffis, Antiwar.com
A suicide bomber killed a U.S. soldier and wounded 18 more Americans in northern Iraq. Anoother U.S. soldier was killed during a roadside bomb blast in Baghdad yesterday. At least 28 people were killed and 58 were injured across Iraq. Meanwhile, Turkey reported striking suspected Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) targets in northern Iraq….

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TRAPPED IN GAZA
Desertpeace
International protests can help the situation in Gaza. This was proven just a few weeks ago when there was an uproar regarding the students that were being denied Fulbright Scholarships. The decision was reversed and all seemed to be ok…. at least for those seven students… But, what about the hundreds of others that are finding themselves in the same situation? Where is the uproar about this? And…. while I’m at it, where is the uproar about the situation in general? Protest the siege on Gaza, protest the genocide against Palestine, protest the apartheid system… PROTESTS DO HELP! SILENCE KILLS!!…

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AMSI: the Visit of Kouchner and Provocative Statement Harms Iraq
Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq (AMSI)
The visit of French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner to the occupied Iraq and his irresponsible statement for Kirkuk showed the absence of political maturity said the Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq (AMSI) in the press statement…The Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq (AMSI) warned that it presents the fulfillments of France from the political gains – rejecting aggression against Iraq – a vulnerability and vibration, is an unexpected provocation to the feelings of the Iraqi people…

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