VIDEO: Death, Destruction Mean Freedom to America
An Iraqi oil engineer showed a film in which US soldiers throw detainees off from buildings and compete in who can shoot the injured first.
Javno.hr
The price of the ‘liberation’ of Iraq has been paid with the lives of more than one million Iraqis, of thousands of American soldiers, of thousands of American mercenaries, an cost over 700 billion dollars. Oil Engineer Ali Kadhim spoke about all these events, and then showed a very shocking film on American crimes, revealing the special role of Iran in the occupation of his country. Iran has helped the Americans to enter Iraq, in order to take revenge for the war we led against them at the time of Saddam Hussein…The film is really shocking. It starts showing the beautiful treasures of Iraq before chaos and death overtook everything. Then it immediately shows scenes of Iraq today. Fires, dead bodies, bombs are everyday life…However, the end, just like the beginning, features a proud theme. Scenes of the Iraqi opposition movement inform everyone that Iraq is not on its knees. The film ends with the message that the Iraqi resistance lives forever…

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Bush’s legacy to America
Tariq A. Al-Maeena
President George Bush should be out of office in a matter of months. “The sooner, the better”, mutter those Americans who view his two terms as president of the United States as one laced heavily with wars and aggression overseas, and poverty at home. While many Americans still believe he only came into office as a result of vote manipulations in Ohio and Florida during the elections, it cannot be denied that his leadership has been bad for America, period!. While there are still a diminishing number of diehards who believe in Bush’s message body and soul, an increasing number of Americans have been turned off by what he has turned America into. This is the impression I gathered in the course of my conversations with Americans from all walks of life. America has become a land where dissenters are seized and imprisoned without due process of the law…

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An Open Letter to Barney Frank
Have You Lost Your Mind or Just Been Bought Out by AIPAC?
KATHLEEN M. BARRY
While you were espousing the freedom of speech and democratic principles of Israel to the House of Representatives on June 18, 2006, were you thinking of Hedy Epstein, the 84 year old Holocaust survivor and American who recently travelled to Israel and visited with Palestinians there? In your proclamation about the freedom in Israel which you mistakenly represented as the only democracy in the Middle East, were you thinking of how it felt for Hedy to be approached by Israel’s security force when she was leaving the country to return to the US and told she is a terrorist. Were you thinking of how the guards had turned their badges around so that she could not get their names while they forced Hedy to undress, while they penetrated her body, because she is a terrorist, because she met with Palestinians, because she listened to them. Is that the freedom you wish to applaud?..

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Human Rights Centre indicates Palestinian children face sexual abuse and other torture in prisons
Special to The Canadian
The Palestinian Prisoners’ Support and Human Rights Centre ADDAMEER, declared that the Israeli forces have arrested almost 6200 Palestinians since the last Intifada started in September of 2000. 350 of those languishing in prison are children who, against international conventions, are still imprisoned in Israeli jails and detention centers. Those youngsters undergo severe punishment and mental stress, living an extremely horrifying health and mental situation. Being subjected to torture, interrogation, beatings, humiliation, insults, degradation, and regular terrorizing, “such conditions will affect their mental well being forever, and will accompany them through their adult life,” the report said…350 prisoners are females, 20 are young Palestinian girls. Some children were born inside the Israeli prisons, and they are experiencing health problems. Mothers experience extremely difficult mental depression being subjected to humiliation, having to give birth while being chained by the wrists and feet…

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Israeli military attacks funeral of slain youth
Saed Bannoura – IMEMC News Report
On Saturday afternoon, Israeli military forces attacked the funeral of 17-year-old Muhammad Anwar ‘Alami, who was shot and killed by Israeli forces on Friday night. Several of the mourners were injured. The attack took place at the Beit Ummar village cemetery, just outside the village of Beit Ummar, north of Hebron. According to eyewitnesses, hundreds of villagers had gathered to bury the child in the cemetery when they were attacked without warning by Israeli military forces. The soldiers fired dozens of canisters of tear gas and volleys of rubber-coated steel bullets at the unarmed civilians. After this provocation, some youth began to throw stones at the soldiers, who responded with even more rubber bullets and tear gas…

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70% of Gaza families under poverty line
Palestinian Information Center
A report by the PA central bureau of statistic has displayed that 57% of Palestinian families were living below poverty line and the percentage dramatically rose in the Gaza Strip to reach 70%. The head of the bureau, Dr. Louai Shabana, announced the report in a press conference, saying that the percentage in the West Bank is 34%. He pointed out that the rate of poverty in the Palestinian lands is the highest among neighboring countries due to the Israeli economic siege…

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Secret U.S. operation kills Iraqi, strains relations
Hannah Allam, McClatchy Newspapers
Senior Iraqi government officials said Saturday that a U.S. Special Forces counterterrorism unit conducted the raid that reportedly killed a relative of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki , touching off a high-stakes diplomatic crisis between the United States and Iraq . U.S. military officials in Baghdad had no comment for the second day in a row, an unusual position for a command that typically releases information on combat operations within 24 hours. The raid occurred at dawn Friday in the town of Janaja near Maliki’s birthplace in the southern, mostly Shiite Muslim province of Karbala . Ali Abdulhussein Razak al Maliki , who was killed in the raid, was related to the prime minister and had close ties to his personal security detail, according to authorities in Karbala…

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Four More Months of This Crap? Noooo…
Arthur Silber
…So, yes, Obama is a gen-u-eyne, full-fledged shithead. McCain is too, of course, but Obama claims to be so different, so noble, so above, below, beyond traditional politics. And he turns out to be a 100% shithead exactly like all the rest of them. Well, when you want power, and when you want to be the most powerful person in the world, you do what you gotta do. And what you gotta do is be a shithead. Speaking of being so different and so beyond traditional politics, this additional excerpt from Obama’s speechifying is good for a chortle. I mean, how many gazillion goddamn times have you heard this kind of meaningless drivel? And that’s why at this moment, we must come together not just as Democrats, but as Americans – united by our understanding that there is no problem we cannot solve; no challenge we cannot meet if we meet it as one nation, as one people. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I contemplate the spectacle of most Americans’ ignorant, lazy, despicably complacent, relentlessly stupid acceptance of impending tyranny at home, genocide abroad, yet another looming act of barbarous murder and conquest that no one is doing a damned thing to stop, and the thought of being “one” with those people is enough to make me slash both wrists immediately…

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Israel to reopen crossing point to Gaza
AFP
Israel on Sunday was due to reopen a Gaza border crossing point for commercial goods, closed after Palestinians fired rockets five days earlier in violation of a truce, a military spokesman said. Authorities initially decided to reopen two key crossing points, but later reconsidered. “We finally decided to only reopen Sufa for the time being,” said spokesman Peter Lerner. “Around 80 trucks filled with goods and humanitarian aid should be authorised to enter the Gaza Strip on Sunday,” he added…

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Mona (a Jerusalemite) tells about the silent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land
Mary Rizzo, Palestine Think Tank
I am writing to share a little about what is happening in my life lately. As most of you know, I have been in Jerusalem since March 18 with Ramzi who at the time had barely turned 5 months. We left Habib and made the sacrifice to be apart for the coming 4 months for the sake of preserving my Jerusalem ID, to keep my residency status. I know this might sound strange, but as a Palestinian who has lived her whole life in Jerusalem, and despite the fact that my family has lived in Jerusalem and Palestine for centuries, according to the Israeli law, Palestinians living in Jerusalem are only residents but not necessarily permanent residents, and therefore are at risk all the time of losing their residency rights…

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From BAFTA to the Border
Felicity Arbuthnot
On 16th June, Mohammed Omer (24) became the youngest journalist to be presented with the prestigious Martha Gellhorn Prize for journalism, 2008. Omer and Dahr Jamail, two independent correspondents, were co-recipients, for their extraordinary coverage of Gaza and Iraq, respectively. Alone, in dangerous and difficult regions, their writings have towered, dwarfing many household names with mega-media backing. As their colleagues (especially other independents) have been murdered and shot, often by security forces and frequently by unknowns, they ploughed a lone, courageous furrough…Last night, this publication received a call from Bernard Dekker, spokesman for the Royal Netherlands Foreign Ministry. “The good news is that he is back in Gaza, via the Allenby Bridge. The bad news is that the Israeli Forces took off all his clothes.” He was so badly treated that: ‘”He vomited, lost consciousness and had to be taken to hospital in Jericho”, by the Embassy car which was again waiting for him. The Netherlands Embassy has also protested to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs…

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Hamas: Truce violators in Gaza will be arrested
Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz
A Hamas leader in Gaza, Mahmoud Zahar, says his organization will arrest anyone who tries to break the cease-fire with Israel and will confiscate their weapons whether they are from Hamas or Islamic Jihad. In an interview published yesterday in Saudi daily Al-Watan, Zahar said anyone who overstepped the national consensus and harmed the interests of the Palestinian people was operating not as a resistance group would but as someone who wants to harm the resistance. Zahar added that Hamas had recently arrested gunmen who fired missiles at the Karni crossing as well as at trucks carrying goods through the crossings…

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ARABAPHOBIA IN FULL SWING
Malcom Lagauche
A few years ago, a person was almost beaten to death in San Diego in a parking lot. The perpetrators hollered racist remarks while they were pounding the merde out of him: “Go back to Iraq you bastard! We’ll come back and kill you if we don’t finish the job now.” They almost killed the man. However, he was of Portuguese descent, not Arabic. The anti-Arab mood is so intense that U.S. bigots don’t care what nationality one is, only that he/she looks like an Arab. That’s good enough. The irony is that most Americans have never met an Arab. They mindlessly make hateful statements without knowing the first thing about their “enemies.” And this attitude comes from a population made of immigrants…

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Israeli Settlement Activity Surges Despite Peace Talks
Dion Nissenbaum
Blue and yellow signs advertising new homes pepper the narrow West Bank roads that wind up to gated hilltop Jewish settlements. “A new stage is on its way,” boasts one billboard promoting a dozen homes being built in this small Israeli settlement not far from Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital. As construction workers press ahead with work on these modest townhouses, telephone salesmen dismiss any concerns that Israel’s pledge to restrict settlement construction in the West Bank could halt the building…

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Gaza: Number of siege victims on the rise
Palestinian Information Center
The popular committee against the siege has announced that a Palestinian cancer patient had died on Friday as a result of inability to cross the Gaza Strip borders for treatment not available in the Strip. The committee in a statement said that Difa Qassem, 55, was a resident of Beit Hanun town in northern Gaza Strip, and added that his death brought to 198 the number of victims who died due to inability to travel abroad in the absence of adequate medical services in the beleaguered Strip…

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Military reinforcements called for in both Anbar and Mosul
Arablinks
The head of the Interior Ministry’s national command center, AbdulKarim Khalaf, said additional military forces are needed in Anbar province, and in a similar vein, the governor of Ninawa province attributed the latest problems there to “insufficiency of military capacity”…

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US Congress endorses an increase in Israel’s security aid
Palestinian Information Center
An Israeli newspaper reported that the US Congress approved a 170 million dollar increase in Israel’s security aid as a part of a new plan aimed to provide the Hebrew state with 30 billion dollars over the next 10 years. 92 congress members voted to increase US aid to Israel while only six members opposed the bill. The Israeli Yediot Ahronot newspaper said that AIPAC welcomed the congressional step, saying it would increase US aid to Israel to 2.55 billion dollars in 2009 up from 2.38 billion dollar aid this year…

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ISRAELIS BEAT AND TORTURE RETURNING JOURNALIST, MOHAMMED OMER
Desertpeace
My dear friend and brother Mohammed Omer returned to his native Gaza Strip on Thursday… literally unconscious and unable to speak after being beaten and tortured by Israeli troops. He is still unable to speak so I was not able to communicate with him, I will be posting updates on his condition in future posts.
Mohammed was in Britain, where he was the recipient of a prize for journalism…

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War News for Saturday, June 28, 2008
Iraq Today
The British MoD is reporting the death of a British ISAF soldier in a vehicle rollover in the central area Helmand province, Afghanistan on Friday, June 27th. Two other soldiers were wounded in the accident. CJTF-101 (happy news) is reporting the death of a coalition soldier during a reconnaissance patrol in the Gulistan District, Farah province, Afghanistan on Thursday, June 26th. Five other soldiers and two Afghani soldiers were wounded in the attack. The Khaleej Times (AFP) is reporting the death of an Azerbaijani soldier in an undisclosed incident while carrying out his duties in Iraq. No other details were released…

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Pak Taliban leader Mehsud suspends peace talks
ANI
Pakistan Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud has suspended peace talks with the government after paramilitaries launched an offensive against militants threatening Peshawar on three fronts. “We are suspending peace talks with the government because the government is constantly using force against us,” Mehsud told news agencies via satellite telephone. “The government is not showing any seriousness and is using force against us. But if the government takes any military action we are also ready for martyrdom,” the Daily Times quoted him, as saying further. Mehsud said that his supporters would not launch any attacks, and denied the government’s claims that his supporters had continued attacks despite peace deals and talks…

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Rare Iraqi Jewish books ‘surface in Israel’
AFP
Some 300 rare and valuable books confiscated from Iraq’s Jewish community by Saddam Hussein’s regime have been secretly spirited into Israel, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday. The books include a 1487 commentary on the biblical Book of Job and another volume of biblical prophets printed in Venice in 1617, the Haaretz daily said…”We bought them from thieves,” Mordechai Ben-Porat, an Iraqi-born Jew and the founder of Jerusalem’s Babylonian Jewry Heritage centre told the newspaper, adding that the foundation paid some 25,000 dollars (16,000 euros)…

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