U.S. Perpetuates Mass Killings In Iraq
Peter Phillips
The United States is directly responsible for over one million Iraqi deaths since the invasion five and half years ago. In a January 2008 report, a British polling group Opinion Research Business (ORB) reports that, “survey work confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003… We now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000. If one takes into account the margin of error associated with survey data of this nature then the estimated range is between 946,000 and 1,120,000"…

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Local Official in Karbala Confesses to Killing Scores of People
Voices of Iraq
A member of the Karbala provincial council detained during last year’s al-Ziyara al-Shaabaniya pilgrimage confessed to having killed scores of officials and citizens, including a fellow local official, clerics and women, the province’s police & operations chief said on Saturday. “We obtained important confessions from a member of the Karbala provincial council, who had been arrested on the 2nd day of the al-Ziyara al-Shaabaniya last year,” Maj. General Raed Shakir Jawdat said in a press conference he held on Saturday at the Karbala police command headquarters… He also said that these killings and assassinations were attended by a witness from the (Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr’s) Mahdi Army, who was to give special fatwas on these killings.”
Jawdat pointed out that there were special death squads, perhaps the most dangerous of which was a group led by a man called Ali Shereia, who had been kidnapped a month ago…

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It’s going to make us sick
Xymphora
Six months after he leaves the White House, George ‘Legacy’ Bush will be lauded by the official historians as one of the greatest American Presidents ever, having: 1. Sorted out the conflict with North Korea; 2. Achieved an understanding with Iran, ending thirty years of conflict; 3. Forced a (phony) peace agreement on the Israelis and Palestinians; 4. Ended the tyranny of Saddam in Iraq, established democracy there, and set the groundwork for the withdrawal of American troops. It’s going to be revolting…

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In face of new evidence child-detainee was abused and tortured
Canada reaffirms support for Khadr’s Guantánamo Bay detention and prosecution
Graham Beverley and Keith Jones
Recently released Canadian government documents and video footage have provided fresh evidence that Canadian citizen Omar Khadr has been abused and tortured by the US military while under detention in the US’s government’s Guantanamo Bay concentration camp. The new evidence underscores that the Canadian government has been complicit in the persecution of Khadr, who, has been in US military custody since 2002, having been apprehended as a 15 year-old child. The video footage, which dates from February 2003, shows a Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) interrogator dismissing and mocking Khadr’s complaints of abuse. At another point a CSIS agent is overheard threatening Khadr with reprisals against his family, most of who live in Canada…

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Iraqi refugees duped by smugglers promising Europe
OMAR SINAN, Associated Press Writer
In the depths of despair, Suzan doused herself and her 14-year-old daughter with gasoline and prepared to set them both on fire. The Iraqi refugee’s dream of reaching Europe was dead. Suzan, a hairstylist, had fled her homeland months earlier under threat from Islamic extremists and paid a smuggler $18,000 to sneak her and her daughter Aya from Turkey to Greece. But when they reached Edirne, near the Greek border, the smuggler vanished. Suzan returned to Istanbul, where she feared the only fate for her and Aya was prostitution…

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JORDAN: Government stops issuing residency permits to Iraqis
IRIN News
The authorities in Amman have said they will no longer issue or extend residency permits to Iraqis who are resident in the kingdom legally or illegally. A deadline by which Iraqis were supposed to get their paperwork in order expired on 17 June 2008. Jordan is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and has no refugee law or asylum procedures. The Jordanian government, therefore, regards the estimated 500,000 Iraqis as “guests”, “temporary visitors” or “illegal aliens”. In March, the Jordanian government asked those Iraqis who had been residing in the kingdom without proper permits, to rectify their status. They were given two options – leave the country in exchange for the writing off of fines imposed for not having the right documents, or pay half the fines and acquire a three-month temporary residence permit…

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Israel’s collective psychosis: The denial syndrome
Khaled Amayreh
This week, Israel sank in an avalanche of national lethargy, hypocrisy and self-righteousness. Seeking to cope with Hezbullah’s success in getting Israel to release all Lebanese prisoners, dead and living, in exchange for the remains of two Israeli soldiers, Israeli leaders, media and shapers of public opinion have been indulging in sanctimonious self-glorification while denouncing the other side as “hateful, uncivilized and representing an inferior culture.” This is a characteristic Israeli behavior. It perfectly characterizes a society that has been living in a state of denial ever since Zionist gangs, aided by western powers, succeeded in uprooting the bulk of native Palestinians from Palestine, their ancestral homeland, and implanting therein Israel, a state based on racism, terror, ethnic cleansing and falsification of history…

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Iraqi PM says US should leave as soon as possible
AP
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says U.S. troops should leave Iraq “as soon as possible,” according to a magazine report, and he called presidential candidate Barack Obama’s suggestion of 16 months “the right timeframe for a withdrawal.” In an interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine released Saturday, al-Maliki said he was not seeking to endorse Obama. The Illinois senator and likely Democratic nominee has pledged to withdraw combat troops from Iraq within 16 months if he is elected…

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The Bellicose Mayor Of Kabul
Mir Adnan Aziz
William Gladstone, British Prime Minister and foremost politician of his time said: “Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own.” In public, defeat in Afghanistan is anathema for western governments. In private, for many, it already seems inevitable – at least if the western definition of “victory” remains the vastly overblown goals set since the overthrow of the Taliban. Similarly, public statements of faith in Afghan democracy are coupled with private expressions of despair when it comes to hopes of improving Hamid Karzai’s, also referred to globally as the mayor of Kabul, administration. Many western officials admit privately that any real hopes of creating a democratic Afghanistan are now dead…

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What’s Missing from the New York Times
The Deaths of Children
EVE SPANGLER
The front page of New York Times this week featured a story on the Israeli-Lebanese exchange of prisoners. The headline tells us that Israeli wounds have been reopened; the accompanying pictures depict a startlingly child-like Lebanese assassin in police custody and two adorable Israeli children, the victims of a cross-border raid; the opening two paragraphs are devoted to the pain of Israeli family tragedies, nearly thirty years ago and now. But there is something missing from this emotional story of endangered children and their families- namely the context in which these tragedies occur. There is no mention here of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the source of the struggle. We are not shown that far more Palestinian than Israeli children live in daily danger: lacking medical treatment in Gaza, on the verge of malnutrition, caught up in brutality at check points or simply walking home from school. We learn little of what every Israeli might easily know from consulting the B’Tselem web site (B’Tselem is dedicated to documenting and contesting human rights violations in the Occupied Terrirtories). Their data show, for example, that in the seven years between September, 2000 and August, 2007, the Israeli defense forces killed 4233 Palestinians and Israeli civilians killed an additional 41…

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“Imperceptible 180 Degree Turn.”
Laura Rozen
Former Iran hand in the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations Gary Sick on the latest US Iran developments: A former boss of mine used to describe a policy reversal, while pretending that nothing had happened, as an attempted “imperceptible 180 degree turn.” There is a lot of that going on today in Washington… I do agree with Michael Rubin’s further comment that the unexpectedly positive signals from both Washington and Tehran suggest that “something deeper” is underway…

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Guantánamo children
Cori Crider, lawyer for Reprieve – Guardian
In a submission to the UN in May, the Pentagon said that no more than eight youths, aged 13 to 17 at time of capture, were held at Guantánamo Bay. But a prisoner list released in 2006 in response to US freedom of information act litigation names 21 inmates under 18 when they arrived. A separate defence department admission brings the total to 22. Testimonies collected by the charity Reprieve, which represents 30 inmates at Guantánamo, indicate the actual number is much higher…

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Russian Diplomat Looks Forward to Iran’s Response to Six Powers’ Proposals
iStockAnalyst
Russia hopes that in two weeks’ time Iran will be able to give a response to the proposals of the “Six” [powers involved], which will allow serious dialogue to begin on Iran’s nuclear programme, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Kislyak told RIA Novosti on Saturday [19 July]. Together with the other political directors from the “Six”, he took part in a meeting between the EU’s High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana and the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Sa’id Jalili. “We very much hope that the two weeks on which we agreed with the Iranian side will be spent in Iran usefully from the viewpoint of refining its understanding of our proposals,” he said…

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Resisting Israeli Land Seizures
The Untold Story of Ni’lin
NEVE GORDON
“Jerusalem bulldozer ‘terrorist’ kills 3 in rampage,” read the headline of a CNN article describing the recent attack of a Palestinian construction worker that left three Israelis dead and scores wounded. A Google news search indicates that the brutal assault was mentioned in 3,525 news articles. USA Today, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, BBC, Fox News and Al Jazeera as well as all the other major media outlets covered the incident. Lesser-known media sources, such as the Khaleej Times in the United Arab Emirates, the Edmonton Sun in Canada and B92 in Serbia, also featured the event. Indeed, one could safely assume that almost all news outlets around the globe provided some type of coverage of the attack…

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Ahmadinejad’s deputy: Iran is a friend of the U.S. and Israel
DPA
The deputy to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Saturday that
Iran was a friend of Israel, Iranian news agencies reported. Iran wants no war with any country, and today Iran is friend of the United States and even Israel… Our achievements belong to the whole world and should be used for expanding love and peace,” said Iranian Vice President Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaei, who is also head of the Cultural Heritage Organization…

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Iran Nuclear Talks End Without Agreement
Glenn Kessler, Washington Post Staff Writer
High-level international talks on Iran’s nuclear program ended inconclusively today in Geneva, with European envoy Javier Solana telling reporters that Iran needed to give a more definitive answer within two weeks. The meeting was significant because for the first time a U.S. diplomat, Undersecretary of State William J. Burns, joined other envoys in meeting with the top Iranian nuclear negotiator. U.S. officials had said the shift in Bush administration policy was intended to help lead to a breakthrough in the impasse over the Iranian program, but if Iran failed to respond positively, it only would unify the international coalition dealing with Iran…

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The coming of the third Palestinian exodus
Jamal Bittar – The Arab American News
Israel has once again sealed off the Gaza Strip from all but limited humanitarian aid, spawning widespread food, water and fuel shortages and crippling the local economy in the overcrowded territory of 1.5 million people. By depriving Palestinians of the basic conditions of a normal life, it is assumed that they will eventually choose to leave in what can once again be sold to the world as a voluntary exodus. And if Palestinians choose to abandon their homeland, then in Zionist thinking they have forfeited their right to it — just as earlier generations of Zionists believed the Palestinian refugees had done by supposedly fleeing during the 1948 and 1967 wars. The ultimate goal of this extreme cruelty is patently clear: removal…

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Iraqi PM backs Obama troop exit plan: report
Reuters
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a German magazine he supported prospective U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months. In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible. “U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.”…

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Iraq’s Sunni Bloc Rejoins Government
Reuters
Iraq’s main Sunni Arab bloc rejoined the Shi’ite-led government on Saturday in a breakthrough for national reconciliation after parliament approved its candidates for several vacant ministerial posts. Getting the Accordance Front to return after it quit a year ago in a row over power sharing has been seen as key to healing divisions between majority Shi’ites and minority Sunni Arabs. Sunni Arabs have little voice in the current cabinet, which is dominated by Shi’ites and ethnic Kurds…

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Kidnappers of Britons in Iraq release video
AFP
The group that kidnapped five Britons in Iraq in May 2007 has released a video to The Sunday Times newspaper and claims that one of the victims has committed suicide, the weekly reported. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who paid a surprise visit to British troops in Iraq earlier on Saturday, described the reports as “distressing” and called for the hostages’ immediate and unconditional release.A Foreign Office spokewoman said the ministry had no “independent verification of the claims in this video” and added that she could not comment on its accuracy…

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No limits on foreign investment in Iran
IranMania.com
Iran’s Deputy Minister of Commerce says foreign investment in Iran simply requires an authorization permit with no additional complications, PressTV reported. In a meeting with South Korean private and public entrepreneurs designed to explain Iran’s rules and requirements for foreign investment and to introduce Iran’s economic and trade capabilities and potential, Mahdi Ghazanfari discussed Iran’s ongoing privatization process of its industries and the many incentives for foreign investment, especially in Iran’s free trade zones…

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