Lost in the cyberspace
Google’s censorship against Uruknet
Uruknet
Google must really have a thing against Uruknet. After Google News’ censorship Uruknet disappears even on Google’s search engine. Google stopped indexing Uruknet the middle of May. After Uruknet wrote (again!) many e-mails to Google (and again! we didn’t receive any reply) Google restarted indexing some (not all!) Uruknet’s article on June 17. However, it seems that these articles have a short life on Google since they keep disappearing immediately after they are indexed. For instance this is a Google’s page saved today, June 19, at 3pm Rome time and this is the same search Google page, the same day at 10 pm Rome time. While the first page at 3pm shows the Uruknet’s article indexed by Google, in the second page’s results the article disappeared and Google left simple the Uruknet’s homepage. Moreover Uruknet’s articles indexed by Google before the middle of May are being disappearing as if someone is manually deleting them. As odd it may seem, it’s as if someone inside Google deleted the indexed article…We don’t ask anymore our readers to write to Google since we lost even our last hopes in their fairness and good faith, but we would be grateful if our readers could post and distribute this article over the Internet; this affair goes far beyond Uruknet and Internet censorship is a real threat and is happening now…

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ANOTHER LIE DEBUNKED
Malcom Lagauche
We’ve heard them all: Saddam killed the entire Iraqi national soccer team; Saddam’s favorite recreational pursuit was to watch people boil in acid; and, let’s not forget the human shredding machine in which people were turned into ground meat and then Saddam fed them to his pets. All these preposterous allegations, and many more, were fed to the people of the West and many were believed. But, a recent claim, even though less dramatic and violent, is more disastrous. Recently, an FBI agent, who interviewed Saddam while the Iraqi president was incarcerated, made statements that people in the U.S. government (Democrat and Republican alike) are now using to legitimize the March 2003 invasion of Iraq: Saddam conned them into believing Iraq had retained massive amounts of weapons of mass destruction after the U.N. ordered the country to destroy them. This new development made a lot of U.S. politicians feel at ease. Now, they can stop making more lies and say the dirty bastard Saddam hoodwinked them again. The truth, as in most instances concerning Iraq, was far different. The Iraqi government was telling the world that it had destroyed its WMD and had fulfilled its obligation to have the sanctions lifted…

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Ex-State Dept. official: Hundreds of detainees died in U.S. custody, at least 25 murdered.”
Think Progress
At today’s House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil Rights hearing on torture, Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, told Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) that over 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody, with up to 27 of these declared homicides: NADLER: Your testimony said 100 detainees have died in detention; do you believe the 25 of those were in effect murdered? WILKERSON: Mr. Chairman, I think the number’s actually higher than that now. Last time I checked it was 108. …

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GOOGLE GAGGING AGAIN ~~ URUKNET REMOVED COMPLETELY
Desertpeace
Uruknet has been hacked, taken of Google News indexing and now, the latest… taken off Google completely. How can this be done? We really don’t know, but we do know that Google has refused to respond to the thousands of requests by readers to reinstate Uruknet on Google News. They came up with a response after weeks only to the site itself where it “reasoned” that Uruknet was “only” an aggregator. All of us know that it is an exceptionally important aggregator, but it is far more than that! It contains original material, has editorial choices and space for commentary and it presents for an international public much material that otherwise would not be translated or disseminated. Without being listed on Google, as much as we detest Google for its arbitrary blocking that many of us have had to undergo, losing readership in the meantime, we are able to admit that for a news site to not be listed AT ALL on Google means that NO ONE at all finds their articles on a simple search…

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Afghanistan’s Killing Fields
Eric Walberg
Two landmarks in Afghanistan last week — British troop deaths surpassed 100, and monthly official coalition deaths now outnumber official coalition deaths in Iraq. Pentagon officials said that in May, 16 coalition troops were killed in Iraq, 14 of them American, while 18 coalition troops were killed in Afghanistan, 13 of them American…But I’ve left out the really spectacular news, the attack by Taliban militants on the main prison in southern Afghanistan late Friday, exploding a car bomb at the main gate in a multi-pronged assault that freed over 1000 prisoners, including 400 suspected Taliban. This blow to the occupation can only be compared to the Vietcong’s Tet offensive against the US occupation of South Vietnam in 1968…

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Leaked U.S. Military Manual
How to train death squads and quash revolutions from San Salvador to Iraq
JULIAN ASSANGE, Wikileaks
Wikileaks has released a sensitive 219 page US military counterinsurgency manual. The manual, Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces (1994, 2004), may be critically described as “what we learned about running death squads and propping up corrupt government in Latin America and how to apply it to other places”. Its contents are both history defining for Latin America and, given the continued role of US Special Forces in the suppression of insurgencies, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, history making….

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US Special Forces counter-insurgency manual FM 31-20-3
Wikileaks
US Army Field Manual FM 31-20-3, Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces; 2004 edition. Made US Army doctrine (policy) on 20 September 1994; 219 printed pages. Written at the sensitive but unclassified level. This sensitive US military counterinsurgency manual could be critically described as “What we learned about running death squads and propping up corrupt government in Latin America and how to apply it to other places”. Its contents are both history defining for Latin America and, given the continued role of US Special Forces in the suppression of insurgencies and guerilla movements world wide, history making….

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Weekly Report: On Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory No. 25/2008 (12 – 18 June 2008)
PCHR – Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
Israeli violations of international law and humanitarian law escalated in the OPT, especially in the Gaza Strip, during the reporting period (12 – 18 June 2008): Shooting: During the reporting period, IOF killed 15 Palestinians and wounded 11 others in the Gaza Strip. On 12 June, IOF killed 5 Palestinian resistance activists and wounded 2 others in separate 3 incidents of air strikes and shooting in Beit Lahia and Jabalia towns in the northern Gaza Strip and Khuza’a village in the southern Gaza Strip. On 15 June, IOF killed 4 Palestinian resistance activists and wounded 4 others in Khuza’a village in the southern Gaza Strip, and in Gaza City. On 17 June, IOF extra-judicially executed 6 members of the Army of Islam and wounded 2 others as well as 3 civilian bystanders in two separate attacks in the central and southern Gaza Strip. IOF aircrafts attacked two cars in the which the victims were traveling….

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IRAQ: Home to Too Many Widows
Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail*
Just about everyone in Iraq is a loser as a result of the occupation, but none more than women. One of the more obvious signs of that is the very large number of widows. The Asharq al-Awsat Arab media channel estimated in late 2007 there were 2.3 million widows in Iraq. These include widows from the 1980-1988 war with Iran in which half a million men were killed, the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, and from ‘natural’ causes. The news outlet cited the Iraqiyat (Iraqi women) group as a source for their figure. For a widow, all things are the same, dark. “Being a widow means being dead in Iraq today,” a professor from Diyala University, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS. “This is because of the tremendous responsibilities cast upon her.”…

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US General Accuses Bush Administration of War Crimes
Matt Renner and Maya Schenwar, T r u t h o u t | Report
Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba (now retired) served as the deputy commanding general for support for the Third Army for ten months in Kuwait during the early days of the Iraq occupation. In a statement released today, he bluntly accuses the Bush administration of war crimes and lays down a challenge for prosecution. In 2004, Taguba released a classified report detailing abuses committed at Abu Ghraib Prison. The “Taguba Report” (executive summary) urged Pentagon officials to follow up on its findings by enforcing adherence to the Geneva Conventions in interrogations…

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New York Times covers up for “confused” US military torturers
David Walsh
On Monday the US Senate Armed Services Committee released documents revealing that preparations to systematically torture inmates at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba were set in motion by officials high up in Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Department in July 2002, half a year after the internment camp commenced operations. That month the office of Defense Department general counsel William Haynes inquired into a program aimed at training American military personnel to resist interrogation if captured, known as Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE). In response, Haynes was sent an extensive list of interrogation methods, ranging from facial slaps to waterboarding, “degradation” and “sensory deprivation.”…

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UN: Iraq conflict exacerbates unprecedented refugee flows
Liam Stack
The number of refugees and internally displaced people swelled to 67 million in 2007, according to a report released Tuesday by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Long-running conflicts, including the war in Iraq, have figured in the unprecedented number of refugees. Of those 67 million, UNHCR provides relief and services to 11.4 million refugees and 26 million internally displaced persons (IDPs). The remainder are Palestinian refugees cared for by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and other displaced persons not covered by the UNHCR. The UN said extended conflicts, climate change, and poverty exacerbated by the global economic slowdown are responsible for the increase, which follows five years of steady decline in the number of refugees and IDPs…

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Torture began at the top
Tim Rutten, LATimes
Apart from understanding how and why the Bush/Cheney administration tricked the American people into going to war in Iraq, no question is more urgent than how the White House forced the adoption of torture as state policy of the United States. An investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee, now partly concluded, already has gone a long way toward explaining the decision to place the United States among the world’s pariah states. In a statement delivered Tuesday, committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) said: “Some have suggested that detainee abuses committed by U.S. personnel at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and at Guantanamo were the result of a ‘few bad apples’ acting on their own. It would be a lot easier to accept if that were true.” In fact, Levin said, senior U.S. officials “sought out information on aggressive [interrogation] techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees.”…

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Stories of Two Little Girls From Gaza
Haitham Sabbah, Palestine Think Tank
Here are two stories from two very bright young ladies from Gaza, Occupied Palestine. The first one is a moving clip taken from an Arabic TV show where she tells her story. Watching it made me and my family cry, so I decided to translate it and share it with you…

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The American Dream: “Talking Peace, Making War”
Review of Doug Dowd’s “At the Cliff’s Edge” (Part II)
Stephen Lendman
…Today the toll rises daily in Iraq and Afghanistan in numbers far higher than reported. Official ones are fiction – for US combatants but far more so for Iraqis and Afghans. Some estimates since the Gulf War place sanctions-caused deaths at around 1.7 million, including 1.2 million children under age five. Add another 200,000 violent Gulf war deaths and up to two million 2003-2007 war deaths, including 800,000 children under age five according to UNICEF. For Afghanistan from 2001- 2007, estimates range up to 3.2 million deaths, including 700,000 children under age five. Consider US casualties as well. Again, media-reported figures are fiction. One estimate totals combatant deaths plus Pentagon wounded count updates. It tops 85,000 from hostile and non-hostile causes plus many thousands later reported with brain traumas from explosions. It leaves out future illnesses and deaths from toxic substances exposure, most critically depleted uranium….

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‘Curveball’ speaks, and a reputation as a disinformation agent remains intact
John Goetz and Bob Drogin, Special to Los Angeles Times
Rafid Ahmed Alwan hoped for an easier life when he came here from Iraq nine years ago. He also hoped for a reward for his cooperation with German intelligence officers. “For what I’ve done, I should be treated like a king,” he said outside a cramped, low-rent apartment he shares with his family. Instead, the Iraqi informant code-named Curveball has flipped burgers at McDonald’s and Burger King, washed dishes in a Chinese restaurant and baked pretzels in an all-night bakery. He also has faced withering international scorn for peddling discredited intelligence that helped spur an invasion of his native country…

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Documents confirm U.S. hid detainees from Red Cross
Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers
The U.S. military hid the locations of suspected terrorist detainees and concealed harsh treatment to avoid the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to documents that a Senate committee released Tuesday. “We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques,” Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, a military lawyer who’s since retired, said during an October 2002 meeting at the Guantanamo Bay prison to discuss employing interrogation techniques that some have equated with torture…

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Britain’s Secret Soldiers In Afghanistan
Mark Stone, Sky News reporter
Three of the four soldiers killed in southern Afghanistan were reservist members of Britain’s SAS. Reservist members of the Special Forces are civilians – they have day jobs back in the UK – and many are former members of the military. Some may well have served with the regular SAS in the past. The expertise of reservist special forces are increasingly needed because, more and more, regular SAS soldiers are leaving the forces, lured into the private security sector by the offer of much better pay. The details of the mission of those who were killed in Afghanistan have not been released. But the use of special forces on an operation illustrates its likely sensitivity…

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Four British soldiers killed in Afghanistan
AFP
Four British soldiers were killed in the restive southern Afghan province of Helmand, officials said Wednesday, including reportedly the first female British military fatality. The soldiers serving with NATO died Tuesday when their vehicle was caught in a blast during what the British defence ministry called “a deliberate operation” east of the provincial capital Lashkar Gah…The Taliban, who have been leading an insurgency since they were ousted from power in a 2001 US-led invasion, claimed responsibility. “We blew up a NATO vehicle in Khokaba village near Lashkar Gah yesterday. Several soldiers were killed,” Yousuf Ahmadi, a Taliban spokesman, told AFP by telephone from an unknown location…

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Report: Exams prove abuse, torture in Iraq, Gitmo
PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer
Medical examinations of former terrorism suspects held by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, found evidence of torture and other abuse that resulted in serious injuries and mental disorders, according to a human rights group. For the most extensive medical study of former U.S. detainees published so far, Physicians for Human Rights had doctors and mental health professionals examine 11 former prisoners. The group alleges finding evidence of U.S. torture and war crimes and accuses U.S. military health professionals of allowing the abuse of detainees, denying them medical care and providing confidential medical information to interrogators that they then exploited…

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US: Shiite ‘special group’ behind Iraq bombing
BUSHRA JUHI, Associated Press Writer
The U.S. military blamed a renegade Shiite group Wednesday for a deadly truck bombing in a Baghdad Shiite neighborhood and said it was seeking to re-ignite sectarian violence. Iraqi officials said the death toll from the bombing rose to 63… U.S. spokesman Lt. Col. Steven Stover said the command did not believe al-Qaida in Iraq was behind the attack based on the type of vehicle and explosives used. Instead, he said the command believed the attack was carried out by a Shiite special group led by Haydar Mehdi Khadum al-Fawadi, whom Stover described as a “murderous thug” seeking to incite violence “for his individual profit and gain.”…

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June 18, 2008: 14 Iraqis Killed, 52 Wounded
Margaret Griffis, Antiwar.com
Relative peace returned to Iraq a day after a major bombing in Baghdad caused well over a hundred casualties. Still, more bodies were found in the rubble or died in hospital from yesterday’s explosion. Overall, at least 15 Iraqis were killed and 42 more were wounded in light violence. Meanwhile, no Coalition deaths were reported today. An unknown number of workers may have been kidnapped in Wassit province…

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