Local official announces cholera-stricken Babel disastrous area
Voices of Iraq
A local official on Sunday said six individuals died of Cholera in Babel,announcing the province as a disastrous area. “Six individuals died of cholera in a hospital and 200 patients admitted to the province hospitals with seeming symptoms of the epidemic disease,”Hasoon Majeed Al-Tufan, the chief of Services committee for Babel’s provincial council, told Aswat al-Iraq-Voices of Iraq(VOI). “Babel’s medical centres were ordered not to report any information for political reasons,”the local official noted…

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Harrowing video film backs Afghan villagers’ claims of carnage caused by US troops
Tom Coghlan, Times
As the doctor walks between rows of bodies, people lift funeral shrouds to reveal the faces of children and babies, some with severe head injuries. Women are heard wailing in the background. “Oh God, this is just a child,” shouts one villager. Another cries: “My mother, my mother.” The grainy video eight-minute footage, seen exclusively by The Times, is the most compelling evidence to emerge of what may be the biggest loss of civilian life during the Afghanistan war. These are the images that have forced the Pentagon into a rare U-turn. Until yesterday the US military had insisted that only seven civilians were killed in Nawabad on the night of August 21. Last night the Pentagon announced that it was reopening the investigation in the light of “emerging evidence” and was sending an officer to Nawabad to review its previous inquiry…

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IRAQ: Lots of rivers, not enough water
Los Angeles Times.
…The latest grim update comes from Hillah, the capital of Babil province south of Baghdad, where health officials have begun using loudspeakers to urge people not to eat ice cream or juice from vendors because it might be made with dirty water. Dr. Ahmed Ajrash, the deputy director of Babil’s health directorate, said today that two people had died of confirmed cases of cholera in Babil. There are 10 suspicious cases, not yet confirmed as the water-borne disease. In Hashimiya, about 18 miles south of Hillah, medical officials say they have seen 250 cases of severe watery diarrhea, some of which may turn out to be cholera. Dozens more suspected cholera cases have turned up in other parts of the country. The problem raises the question: How can a country with two major rivers — the Tigris and the Euphrates — not have sufficient clean water for its people? The problem stems from Iraq’s aging water treatment facilities, which were damaged or destroyed during the war and have yet to be replaced or repaired…

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9/11 Accomplices vie for US Presidency
Obama and McCain campaigns fan “war on terrorism” hysteria
Larry Chin, Online Journal
In his much-ballyhooed acceptance speech, Barack Obama declared that he would “finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11". If Obama wishes to be true to his promise, he could begin with his own running mate, Senator Joe Biden. Biden was one of several top Washington officials who met with Lieutenant General Mahmoud Ahmad, the head of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) on and around September 11, 2001. The ISI is a foreign branch of the CIA. “Al-Qaeda” is a covert operation that is managed by Anglo-American military-intelligence. Ahmad, the “9/11 money man” who delivered funds to alleged lead suicide hijacker Mohammed Atta prior to the attacks, met personally with Biden on September 13, 2001. This case, detailed in Michel Chossodovsky’s Political Deception: Missing Link Behind 9/11, remains one of hundreds of smoking guns revealing direct US connections to 9/11, for which Biden has never provided a credible explanation…

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Iraq mental trauma is a time bomb, says ex-SAS author Andy McNab
BelfastTelegraph
Andy McNab, the former SAS soldier turned author, has warned that Britain faces a social crisis because of the mental trauma suffered by veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars. “This is not something new, people have been suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder for years from past conflicts, yet we still don’t have anything like an adequate system for looking after them,” said McNab…

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US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visits Libya
Ann Talbot
…The greater bargaining power that Qaddafi has acquired does not mean that he is in any way independent of imperialism or can offer his own people or the mass of the African and Arab population an alternative perspective. All that he is concerned to do is achieve the best deal he can for Libyan gas and oil. The benefits of these deals will accrue to the elite around Qaddafi and his family. Ordinary working people will find that their living standards continue to deteriorate. Qaddafi has made it clear that he intends to privatize the last vestiges of the welfare reforms that he introduced when he came to power. Electricity and telephone services are to be privatized. Health and education will follow…

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Iraqi parliament faces urgent national issues
QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA, Associated Press Writer
Iraqi lawmakers end their summer break this week facing urgent tasks of approving a new election law and signing off on a still-unfinished security pact with the U.S. — key steps in laying the foundation for a lasting peace. The 275-member legislature failed last month to approve a law providing for provincial elections this fall after Kurds objected to a power-sharing arrangement for the oil-rich area around Kirkuk, which they want to incorporate into their self-ruled region in the north. U.N. and Iraqi election officials warn the balloting cannot be held this year unless parliament approves the measure quickly after it reconvenes Tuesday…

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Cholera kills one, infects six in Iraq: official
Reuters
Seven cases of cholera have been diagnosed in Iraq in the past two days, including one fatality, a senior health official said on Sunday. Scarcity of water during Iraq’s scorching summer forces more people to drink water from unsafe sources, the official said. More than 4,000 cases of cholera, which can kill victims with sudden severe diarrhea, were diagnosed in Iraq last year. Iraq’s General Director of Public Health Ihsan Jaafar said as long as there was scarcity of water, cholera would remain a problem…

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September 7, 2008: 20 Iraqis Killed, 26 Wounded
Margaret Griffis, Antiwar.com
At least 20 Iraqis were killed or found dead and 26 more were wounded in the latest reports. Hundreds more are ill in what may be a new cholera epidemic. Meanwhile, Baghdad suffered a number of small bomb attacks, and an accidental gas leak sickened several dozen in Karbala. No Coalition deaths were reported anywhere. Cholera has taken the lives of six people in Babel and sickened another 200 people there. A boy has died in Missan province. Six more Iraqis, all in the greater Baghdad area, are ill as well. Cholera often spreads through unsanitary water supplies. Because of the war, Iraq has been unable to upgrade its waterworks properly. Last year at least two dozen Iraqis died and 4000 more were sickened by the disease…

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Inmates tell of sexual abuse and beatings in Iraq’s overcrowded juvenile prison system
Jonathan Steele, The Guardian,
Hundreds of children, some as young as nine, are being held in appalling conditions in Baghdad’s prisons, sleeping in sweltering temperatures in overcrowded cells without working fans, no daily access to showers, and subject to frequent sexual abuse by guards, current and former prisoners say. At Karkh juvenile prison, Omar Ali, a 16-year-old who has spent more than three years there, showed the multiple skin sores he and many other fellow inmates have contracted through lying on thin, sweat-soaked mattresses night after night…
Guards often take boys to a separate room in the prison and rape them, Omar alleged… Omar Ali was 13 when interior ministry special forces raided his house in a predominantly Sunni suburb in October 2004. He and his 14-year-old brother were arrested. A week later the special forces came back and took their father. All three are still in custody. The ministry is under Shia control and its forces have repeatedly been accused of targeting innocent Sunnis. Sahar Muhammad, the boys’ mother, told the Guardian that when she was able to visit her sons they told her they were beaten repeatedly in the first days of custody and ordered to sign a blank sheet of paper on which charges would be written later…

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Cave Dwellers: Biden Backs Down From Any Pursuit of Bush Crime
Chris Floyd
There was a flurry and flutter of hope among many of the progressive faithful last week after reports of a declaration by Joe Biden that an Obama administration might pursue criminal charges against top Bush officials. The happy cry went up: At last, the Democrats are laying it on the line, standing up to defend the Constitution, the rule of law and common human decency againt a vicious gang of mass murderers and tyrannical thugs! Fightin’ Joe will lead the way! But by week’s end, Fightin’ Joe was caving and cratering in the time-honored Democratic fashion. As Raw Story reports, Biden went on what is rapidly becoming the Dem ticket’s favorite venue — Fox News — and heatedly denied an interviewer’s allegation that “if you guys are elected…you’re actually going to pursue criminal charges against President Bush’s administration and different people that served there.”…

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Shimon Peres: murderer, liar and hypocrite
By Khalid Amayreh in Ramallah
Once again, we are affronted by another despicable statement by Shimon Peres, the deceitful elderly Israeli president who has spent a lifetime serving the evil Zionist enterprise. In a statement in Rome on Friday, 5 September, Peres called for barring Hamas from taking part in any future elections in occupied Palestine until the group terminated all forms of resistance to the Nazi-like Israeli occupation. Peres utterly ignored the lingering reign of murder and terror inflicted for too long on the helpless and virtually unprotected Palestinians by a morally callous state that thinks that the events which took place in Europe more than six decades ago justify the genocidal ethnic cleansing being meted out to Zionism’s victims…

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Al-Khudari: Israel destroying Gaza industrial sector; 70 million USD in losses per month
Ma’an news
The crisis in Gaza’s industrial sectors has continued to escalate despite the truce, since Israel has prevented any raw materials from entering the area, said chairman of the Popular Committee Against the Siege Jamal Al-Khudari on Saturday. Al-Khudari, who is also a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, sent a press release outlining the Israeli policies that lead to the closure of 3,900 factories and workshops in the Gaza Strip, leaving 70,000 Gazans unemployed. Despite continuous calls and efforts to place pressure on Israel, said Al-Khudari, plastic, wood, chemicals, wools and woods have not been allowed in to the Strip to allow factories to run…

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Severe water shortage in West Bank; some homes without water for weeks
Ma’an news
A coalition of Palestinian and international NGOs issued a statement on Friday calling the water shortage across the West Bank a “humanitarian crisis” and said they were “gravely concerned.” The coalition said that there was a reduction in water supplies from rainfall averaging 45% across the West Bank, which has left 200 communities not served by the municipal water sources at a loss. There is not enough water for cooking, cleaning, agricultural irrigation, or basic food-producing plant watering. Even in cities and villages connected to water mains, reduction in supply means frequent cut offs for homes and offices. It is common in many areas to not have water for a week, and others only receive water once in a fortnight…

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Is it the 1930s all over again?
William Bowles
The parallels with the situation in Europe prior to the outbreak of WWII surely cannot be avoided, for not only do we have an economic crisis that closely resembles the ‘29 Crash in its magnitude, the US-engineered invasion of South Ossetia could very well be a prelude to more dangerous provocations on the part of the US, in much the same way that German support for the fascist coup in Spain served as a testing ground not only for Hitler’s military machine but also to sew chaos and to test the reactions of two of the leading imperialist powers of the time, Britain and France. For what they all shared was a hatred of Bolshevism and ultimately, that’s what WWII was really all about, the destruction of the Soviet Union. So is history repeating itself, perhaps not as farce but as an even greater tragedy? There are of course fundamental differences not only within Europe but in the world at large…

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Israeli police recommend indicting Olmert on Corruption charges
Saed Bannoura – IMEMC
The Israeli Police submitted on Sunday its recommendations to Israel’s Attorney General, Menachem Mazuz, urging him to indict the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, in two corruption cases. The recommendations were submitted after a deliberation session held by the investigation department on Sunday morning. The Israeli online daily, Haaretz, reported that the two cases in question are the Rishon Tours double billing affair, and the Talansky affair…

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Cheney Fails to Garner Azeri Support on Nabucco Pipeline
The Moscow Times
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney has failed to win Azerbaijan’s support for the construction of a new gas pipeline from the Caspian that would bypass Russia. Azeri President Ilham Aliyev indicated to Cheney during talks in Baku on Wednesday that he did not want to anger Russia in the wake of its invasion of neighboring Georgia, Kommersant reported, citing an official in Aliyev’s administration. Cheney was so disappointed that he did not attend an official dinner in his honor, the report said.

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Arab activists accuse Israel of Gaza ‘genocide’
AFP
A group of Arab international lawyers and human rights activists accused Israel on Sunday of committing “genocide” through its crippling blockade of the Gaza Strip. “The catastrophic situation in which Gaza citizens live, which led to the deterioration of medical, economic, ecological and humanitarian conditions, in addition to the death of innocent people, amounts to genocide,” said the 11 activists in a statement received by AFP. By preventing food and medicines from reaching civilians “under the pretext of besieging ‘a terrorist government’,” Israel is committing “genocide” as defined in the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, they wrote…

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‘CIA helped draw up dodgy Iraq war dossier for No 10'
This is London
Secret advice from a foreign power, thought to be America, helped to shape the dossier that said Saddam Hussein could attack within 45 minutes and set out the case for war in Iraq. MI6 chief John Scarlett, then chairman of the Government’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), turned to the foreign country as final touches were put to the now discredited dossier, it has emerged. The document, which the Government is accused of ‘sexing up’ in the weeks before it was made public, contained a string of claims that later proved false…

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An Iraqi Exodus
Out of Money and Options in Egypt, Some Refugees Are Heading Home
Ellen Knickmeyer, Washington Post Foreign Service
…The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and other international refugee organizations have declined to support the Iraqi government return initiative. Independent refugee advocates say that while the scenes of refugees returning to Iraq may bolster the Iraqi government’s image, people are returning because they have exhausted their savings and no longer have the option of staying abroad. “No one’s going back by choice,” said Barbara Harrell-Bond, who left Egypt this month after years as a visiting professor in the refugee studies program at the American University in Cairo. “That’s just bloody propaganda.” Virtually all Iraqis who fled Iraq did so because they came under specific threat or because close relatives had been killed or kidnapped, Harrell-Bond said. And five years into the war, she said, some Iraqi refugees in Egypt are living only on bread. “Everybody’s getting destitute,” said Harrell-Bond, who said she left $7,000 of her own money in Egypt to feed and house Iraqis, on the condition that they not use the money to return to Iraq. “They are just desperate.”..

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One million signatures to be sent to UN to urge it to end Gaza siege
Palestinian Information Center
Dr. Eyad Al-Sarraj, the founder of the Gaza community mental health program, announced Saturday that the international Palestinian campaign to break the siege intends to collect one million signatures from Gaza citizens and submit them in a document to the UN general assembly in order to urge it to take immediate decision to end the unjust siege on the Gaza Strip. According to Sarraj, the document, which will be sent to the UN General Assembly on the occasion of holding its regular session, confirms that the Israeli siege violates the international system of human rights and international humanitarian law as well as the fourth Geneva convention which obliges Israel to respect civilians in time of war…

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IRAQ: Southern tribal council urges sacking trade, electricity ministers
Voices of Iraq
The Southern Arab Tribal Council, in a conference held on Sunday in Basra province, called for sacking the ministers of trade and electricity for their “slackness to do their jobs” in a way corresponding with the citizens’ needs. “The trade ministry has caused several harms to Iraqi citizens by trimming the items on the ration cards, let alone the bad quality of the all imported items,” Sheikh Muhammad al-Zidawi, the council secretary-general, told Aswat al-Iraq – Voices of Iraq – (VOI)…

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Video: Iraqi Children Liberated From Education
MarzuqVision, The Rabbit Hole
Iraq’s intolerable conditions have forced millions of Iraqi children to give up their education and turn to the streets – in search of a living that is often mixed with hard work and danger…

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Ramadan in Palestine
Mazin Qumsiyeh, Palestine Think Tank
Palestinian houses are easily distinguished from Israeli houses by one non-variant feature: Palestinian houses have water storage tanks on top of them. Running water 24 hours a day is reserved for Israeli colonial settlers. A trickle is occasionally sent our way and we try to maximize its use. But storage tanks on top of roofs are increasingly not helpful as the water pressure is so low when it is on that water cannot reach that high. Those who can afford it, have started putting new tanks on the ground or buying supplemental water. Drilling and maintaining wells (as our ancestors did) has been forbidden by Israeli regulations for many decades. Our old house is an exception since we do have a well that collects rainwater. Occasionally after long stretches of no or barely running water, a relative asks if they could have a bath at our house. Water here also costs a lot more than it does to Israeli colonial settlers. Not coincidentally the water we are denied is our water. 80% of the water of the West Bank is used by Israeli Jews (illegally according to International law)…

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Asif Ali Zardari: the godfather as president
He may be a pliant partner for the west, but with his record of corruption, Zardari is the worst possible choice for Pakistan
Tariq Ali
Asif Ali Zardari – singled out by fate to become Benazir Bhutto’s husband and who, subsequently, did everything he could to prevent himself from being returned to obscurity – is about to become the new President of Pakistan. Oily-mouthed hangers-on, never in short supply in Pakistan, will orchestrate a few celebratory shows and the ready tongues of old cronies (some now appointed ambassadors to western capitals) will speak of how democracy has been enhanced. Zardari’s close circle of friends, with whom he shared the spoils of power the last time around and who have remained loyal, refusing all inducements to turn state’s evidence in the corrruption cases against him, will also be delighted. Small wonder then that definitions of democracy in Pakistan differ from person to person…

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Russia ships to join Venezuela naval exercises in Caribbean
By Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
The Venezuelan government announced today that four Russian naval vessels will participate in joint exercises in the Caribbean this year, a move that could heighten already strained relations between Washington and Moscow. Venezuela’s naval intelligence chief, Adm. Salbatore Cammarata Bastidas, said in a statement that a task force including four Russian naval vessels and 1,000 Russian military personnel would take part in mid-November exercises with Venezuelan frigates, patrol boats, submarines and aircraft…

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PAKISTAN: Tribal elders warn against incursions by US-led forces
Sarmad Qazi
“ONE more incursion into the Pakistani territory by the US-led occupying forces in Afghanistan and we will retaliate”, a senior member of the Pakistani coalition government said yesterday. Speaking to Gulf Times during a telephone interview from Islamabad, Munir Khan Orakzai, who is the member of Pakistan’s National Assembly from the tribal Kurram Agency, said: “We (the FATA members) have been promised by the government, including Asif Zardari, that if there is another attack on our land from anyone, we must exercise the right to retaliate.”…

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September 6, 2008: 25 Iraqis Killed, 60 Wounded
Margaret Griffis, Antiwar.com
A number of bomb attacks occurred in Iraq today, the most significant one in Tal Afar. Overall, at least 25 Iraqis were killed and 60 more were wounded. No Coalition deaths were reported. Also, the U.N. representative in Iraq met with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and stressed the need for provincial elections to take place soon…

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F&F Bust
Moon of Alabama
Sarah Palin just offered a solution for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Sell ‘em on Ebay. No, not really. But Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are the big news today. Over this weekend they will, in effect, get nationalized and in the end the U.S. taxpayer will take responsibility for their losses. The mechanism Secretary of the Treasury Paulson will use to put F&F into ‘conservatorship’ is yet unknown. The most likely way is for F&F to issue preferred stock and for the treasury to by these. Common stocks would thereby get diluted to penny levels…

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GI Special 6I2: Candidates Demand Immediate Withdrawal
Thomas F. Barton
… Dear Friends, CO Sahar Vardi, 18, from Jerusalem, has been sentenced today (25 Aug) to 7 days in military prison (more will likely follow after she is released). Sahar is the third conscientious objector, and the first woman, to be imprisoned among a new group of high school seniors, who signed a collective declaration of refusal to serve in the Israeli army of occupation, and in the work of organising which she has been very strongly involved…

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