Colonial Wars Update
Doug’s Darkworld
An update on what’s going on in the three new colonies set up by the Bush administration in his efforts to make the world a better place. (Of course making the world a better place means installing pro-American administrations in resource rich areas of the world.) I am of course talking about Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. And by colonies and colonial wars, I mean just that. In all three cases Bush decreed that the locals had no right to run their own affairs, and with the blessing of the UN had them invaded and occupied. And of course after the “objectionable” governments were removed from power, western approved “governments” were set up. This is just plain old fashioned colonialism, dressed up a bit in modern propaganda. There’s many amazing things about this situation to rant about The first is the media’s almost complete cooperation in this process. In all three cases the media routinely uses colonial propaganda if it were describing fact. In all cases the original local governments of these countries are referred to as “taking over” their nations, as if they were some sort of hostile invading force. This is quite literally akin to saying George Washington “took over” the United States….

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Taliban Near Kandahar
IslamOnline.net & News Agencies
…”The Taliban are getting stronger and stronger,” Agha Lalai Wali, an official with the government-sponsored Peace and Reconciliation Commission in Kandahar, told the Washington Post. “And after they attacked the prison, that gave them higher morale.” Despite the deployment of about 70,000 foreign troops, Taliban has been gaining more ground. Its fighters have stepped up their attacks in recent months, raiding a five-star hotel in Kabul in January and targeting a televised military parade attended by Karzai in April. A November report by the Senlis Council said Taliban has permanent presence in more than half of Afghanistan…

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Hamas says Gaza cease-fire reached with Israel
JOSEF FEDERMAN, AP
The Gaza Strip’s ruling Hamas militant group said Tuesday it has reached a cease-fire with Israel meant to halt a cycle of deadly Palestinian rocket attacks that rained hundreds of rockets on Israel in the past year and Israeli reprisals that have killed hundreds of Palestinians. The accord, set to go into effect at 6 a.m. Thursday (11 p.m. EDT Wednesday), has the bigger aim of ending Israel’s yearlong economic blockade of Gaza and bringing home a captive Israeli soldier….

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IRAN and AMERICA, the complex relationship is not always what it seems?
Lee Jay Walker Dip BA MA
…Yet when we look at foreign affairs then we see a different relationship because both nations have often helped each other in recent times. For example during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo respectively, America gave tacit approval to Iran to break the military arms embargo. Therefore, Christians were massacred in both wars by a joint American-Iranian policy aimed at creating Islamic states in the Balkans. If we turn the clock even further back, then even under the late Ayatollah Khomeini we see strange dealings. For example Oliver North was involved in the Iran-Contra affair, whereby Iran was involved in supporting the Contras in Nicaragua, via American economic support and dealings. Therefore, elements within the American administration were adopting a different policy. Now if we forward the clock to more recent times then the same situation happens again. For example, when America attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan they allied themselves with the Northern Alliance. The Northern Alliance in turn was supported by both the Russian Federation and Iran.
If we also focus on Iraq then a similar linkage emerges once more. Because Iran also gave covert support to America via knowledge they had obtained during the Iran-Iraq war…

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Charges against Marine officer in Haditha case dropped
AFP
Charges against a senior US Marine officer accused of failing to properly investigate the deaths of 24 Iraqi civilians were dismissed Tuesday, a military spokesman confirmed. Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Chessani was the highest-ranking officer to face criminal charges following the killings in Haditha in November 2005 but walked free after a hearing at the Marine Corps Camp Pendleton base near San Diego. A spokesman at the base could not immediately provide details of why charges against Chessani had been dismissed….

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The art of war: US lieutenant brings Iraqi paintings to New York
Paola Messana, AFP
With fiery reds and black-oil-stained browns criss-crossed with misshapen ladders, Mohammed al-Hamadany paints the violence of Baghdad, the battles over power and the shattered innocence. For the US military it was the 2003 “Shock and Awe” invasion, but the Iraqi painter ambiguously calls the 25 tall, narrow panels of the time, showing frightened faces in tenement windows and the statue of Saddam Hussein ghoulishly crumpling, the “Night of Fire.” With the massive work he has brought the horrific chaos of the invasion, five years later, to the United States, as the centerpiece of a new exhibition of contemporary art from the Middle Eastern country…

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U.S. forces kill, arrest 8 family members in Mosul- source
Voices of Iraq
Eight persons of one family were killed or arrested by U.S. security forces during a raid on their house in southern Mosul city, a source from Ninewa police said on Tuesday. “At the early hours of Tuesday morning, U.S. troops raided a house in al-Mahatta area, southern Mosul, killed four family members and arrested four others,” the source, who requested anonymity, told Aswat al-Iraq-Voices of Iraq- (VOI). “The dead were the father and three of his sons, whose bodies have been transferred to the morgue,” the source added, providing no further details of the motivations behind the incident…

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Letters from Gaza (10)
…water and the summer in Gaza
Najwa Sheikh Ahmed
…In some parts of Gaza, people only get running water for two to three hours a day. Sometimes they stay awake all night to check when the water supply comes on so that they can fill their tanks and enjoy a shower in the morning. Some families collect the rain water in the winter to make up for the lack of water. Others, perhaps the majority, buy purified drinking water. All of this in the 21st century – it seems so far away from the modern life enjoyed by many. When you find yourself unable to have or to use water the whole day through, when you can’t enjoy a clean glass of water and force yourself to drink it despite its smell and colour, when your son comes back home from school thirsty because there is no access to clean water in his school, when you are frightened to go to the beach because it is so polluted from dumped sewage, then you know that you are in Gaza…

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Afghanistan and Iraq drive up global refugee toll
Laura MacInnis, Reuters
The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan drove up the number of world refugees for a second straight year in 2007, the United Nations said on Tuesday. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said there were 11.4 million refugees under its responsibility at the end of 2007, up from 9.9 million the year before. “Much of the increase in refugees in 2007 was a result of the volatile situation in Iraq,” the UNHCR said in a report, noting Iraqis and Afghans were nearly half the refugees under its care…

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Iraq law on Baathists not being implemented
Ahmed Rasheed, Reuters
When the Iraqi parliament passed a law in January aimed at rehiring former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party, U.S. President George W. Bush praised it as a step towards national reconciliation. The Accountability and Justice Law replaced the deBaathification Law, under which tens of thousands of former Baathists, mostly Sunni Arabs, were purged from government and security posts following the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. But five months later, implementation of the law is bogged down by infighting between politicians. The government has still not appointed a seven-member panel to replace the deBaathification Committee, whose enthusiastic purge of Baathists from government posts prompted minority Sunni Arabs to accuse them of conducting a witch-hunt…

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Car bomb kills 51 in Baghdad: security officials
AFP
A car bomb at a bus stop in north Baghdad killed at least 51 people and wounded 75 others on Tuesday, security officials told AFP. The attack, the biggest in past eight weeks, took place in the mainly Shiite Al-Hurriyah neighbourhood at around 5:30 pm (1430 GMT), they said. Security officials said the victims were taken to several hospitals in the Iraqi capital…

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Israeli air strikes kill five Palestinians and wound five others in Gaza
Palestinian Information Center
Five Palestinians were killed, four of them reportedly affiliated with the Army of Islam, and five others were wounded following two Israeli aerial attacks carried out Tuesday afternoon on two cars in southern and central Gaza Strip. Palestinian eyewitnesses in Khan Younis city where the first strike took place told the PIC reporter that an Israeli military drone fired one air-to-ground missile on a car traveling at the crossroads of Al-Qarara, north of the city, which resulted in the death of four Palestinians in the car and one passerby and the injury of three others…

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Taliban Destroying Bridges, Planting Mines In Prep For Battle With Afghan Troops
NOOR KHAN and JASON STRAZIUSO, Associated Press Writers
Taliban fighters destroyed bridges and planted mines after overrunning villages outside southern Afghanistan’s largest city, Afghan officials and witnesses said. Hundreds of farm families fled while the Afghan army rushed in troops. Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defense said Tuesday that between 300 and 400 militants took over the Arghandab region 10 miles northwest of Kandahar.
Afghan officials, fearing a major battle, told residents to leave the area.
The Taliban have long sought to control Arghandab and the good fighting positions its pomegranate and grape groves offer. With control cemented, militants could cross the flat plains to make probing attacks into Kandahar, in possible preparation for an assault on their former stronghold…

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A Friendship Marked by Deepening Distrust
Tariq A. Al-Maeena,
…Perhaps it was the claim by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf that after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America, he was told by Richard Armitage, then the US deputy secretary of state, to support Washington or his country would be “bombed back to the Stone Age” that prompted his sleeping with the devil. Musharraf, then the army chief and president, states in his book: “I felt very frustrated by Armitage’s remarks. It goes against the grain of a soldier not to be able to tell anyone giving him an ultimatum to go forth and multiply, or words to that effect.” The statement highlights the underlying resentment with which many Pakistanis view the US-Pakistan relationship: That their country is a reluctant, bullied US ally dependent on American charity. Seven years on and it hasn’t got any better. Today, distrust between the two allies is deepening. The American air and artillery strikes that killed 11 Pakistani paramilitary soldiers on the Afghan border last week have raised concerns about the deteriorating American relationship with Pakistan…

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An Epidemic of Psychological Wounds
The Brain Trauma Vets
CONN HALLINAN
David Hovda, director of the Brain Injury Research Center at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), calls traumatic brain injury (TBI) the “silent epidemic.” It is the most common cause of death for U.S. adults under the age of 45, deadlier than AIDS, Multiple Sclerosis, spinal cord injury and breast cancer combined. It strikes down 1.6 million Americans a year. And while TBI may be a quiet wound, its consequences for victims, family, friends and co-workers can be catastrophic. Adding to that 1.6 million figure are two wars whose signature injury are blast-induced head wounds. A recent study by the General Accounting Office found that, “Traumatic brain injury has emerged as the leading injury among U.S. forces serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.”…

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High Water Everywhere: Court Ruling Won’t Stem the Terror War Flood
Chris Floyd
… Indeed, at one point, the International Red Cross determined that between 70-90 percent of the thousands being held by the Americans in Iraq were innocent of any crime, much less terrorism or insurgent activity. And the treatment meted out to these captives has been brutal, often bestial, sometimes fatal, as we’ve reported here (and elsewhere) for years. Again, another story in the McClatchy series gives an excellent roundup of some of the most egregious known cases – and the lack of any real punishment even for the murder of detainees. There is a good reason for this lack of justice, as McClatchy notes: George W. Bush deliberately created a fog of lawlessness to cover the tortures that he and his top minions – the “National Security Principals” – ordered, with full knowledge that these actions were crimes subject to the death penalty under U.S. law…

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Haneyya: Truce agreement will be concluded separately from the issue of Shalit
Palestinian Information Center
Ismail Haneyya, the premier of the PA caretaker government, stated Monday that a truce agreement might be soon concluded, pointing out that the issue of Israeli captive soldier Gilad Shalit will be dealt with separately. During the inauguration of the headquarters of the labor ministry in Gaza city, Haneyya hailed Egypt’s efforts in this regard which was able to meet the demands of Hamas for separating the issue of the Israeli captive soldier from the calm issue. The premier expressed his hope that the calm would fulfill the Palestinian people’s demands represented in stopping the aggression, lifting the siege and opening the crossings, underlining that the truce must be simultaneous and implemented first in Gaza and then in the West Bank…

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Year of Hamas, What Say Gazans?
Motasem Dalloul, IOL Correspondent
A year to this month, fighters of the resistance group Hamas, which at the time was leading a national unity government, routed fighters and security troops loyal to rival and coalition partner Fatah. The takeover prompted President Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah leader, to sack the coalition government and gave ammunition for the West and Israel to tighten sanctions against the impoverished coastal territory, home to nearly 1.6 million. In the first anniversary of Hamas takeover onto the Gaza Strip, impoverished Gazans describe that step in different ways. However, Hamas still insists what happened was a needed but exceptional security step. IslamOnline.net has interviewed a number of Gazans of different backgrounds for their own take on the issue…

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‘No immunity’ for Iraq contractors
AlJazeera.net
A controversial deal on the long-term US military presence in Iraq will not include immunity for US contractors working in the country, the Iraqi foreign minister has said. Speaking exclusively to Al Jazeera, Hoshyar Zebari said on Monday that the US had accepted the demand and it would be stated explicitly in the agreement. “There would be no immunity whatsoever for private contractors because of what we’ve gone through with them in the past and because of the sensitivities for the Iraqi people,” he said. Zebari said his country was making major progress in finalising the deal by the end of June and the US was showing “great flexibility”…The Iraqi foreign minister said he had spoken to Barack Obama, the US Democratic presidential candidate, who had assured him that, if elected, he would make “no reckless or drastic” decision to withdraw US troops from Iraq…

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Iraqi government prohibits dealing with the Iranian MKO
Voices of Iraq
The Iraqi government on Tuesday decided to prohibit dealing with the Iranian Mojahedine Khlaq Organization (MKO). The decree encompasses any organization, party, institution, and individual, Iraqis or foreigners, inside Iraq, and that anyone who violates this decree will be charged according to the terror law…Some legislatures demanded that lawmaker Saleh al-Motlak be arrested for visiting the MKO’s compound. “I would be honored if I would be detained, because I stood with the oppressed,” al-Motlak responded. “In each visit I made, I found this organization totally disarmed, and working day and night to live,” he said.
“Relations with the MKO is against the Iranian intervention in Iraq, and is much less dangerous than the relations with Iran,” he added. Al-Motlak stressed that he would stop his relation with the MKO, “if it harms the interest of one Iraqi, but with proof.” …

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Israel’s gulag
Already living atop of one another, Gaza’s people under siege are effectively inmates in a concentration camp
Saleh Al-Naami
…Anyone who takes an honest look at conditions in Gaza under siege will find striking the resemblance to the prison. Some 178 Palestinians have died to date because they have been barred from leaving the Strip for medical treatment abroad. Rami Abdu, spokesperson of the Popular Committee for Resisting the Siege, told the Weekly that 31 per cent of the patients Israel has barred from travelling abroad have been children under 15. Abdu said that this percentage does not include the hundreds of sick and wounded who don’t apply to travel because they are certain the occupation will reject their applications. Farah Said Al-Sawaf, two years old, suffers from a tumour in her right kidney. Her parents applied for her to travel for treatment but the occupation still hasn’t accepted her application. Farah’s mother attended a press conference last week held by the families of sick children who have been barred from travelling. Crying, she said, “what body can bear such pain? What can I do as my child dies in my arms? Only hours stand between us and her fate.”…The Gaza Strip is considered to have the highest population density in the world. A million and a half people live in an area of 365 square kilometres. Even without the siege it can be considered a prison, but the siege makes its reality clear to all. More than a prison, the Gaza Strip is Israel’s very own concentration camp.

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