Exclusive: Secret Army squad ‘abused Iraqis’
MoD inquiry into claims that ‘shadowy’ unit is guilty of torture
Robert Verkaik
January 2, 2010 – A secret army interrogation unit accused of being responsible for the widespread abuse of Iraqi prisoners is being investigated by the Ministry of Defence. Fourteen fresh claims of torture against the British Army include detailed accounts of a shadowy team of military and MI5 interrogators who are alleged to have authorised the physical and sexual abuse of Iraqi detainees. The new allegations bring the total number of cases being investigated by the Government to 47…

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Iraqi prisoners ‘were sexually humiliated by female British soldier’
Tom Coghlan and Alice Fordham in Baghdad
January 2, 2010 – A female British soldier is accused of sexually humiliating and abusing prisoners in Iraq in a series of claims about British troops in Basra, The Times has learnt. Five former detainees have made specific allegations against a female interrogator they knew as “Katy”. The claims are among 14 new cases brought against a secretive British Army interrogation unit. These bring to 40 the total of pending British court cases by former Iraqi detainees. Sexual abuse was routinely practised by the Joint Forward Intelligence Team (JFIT) between 2003 and 2007, it is claimed, when the unit ran the Divisional Temporary Detention Facility based at the Shaibah Logistics Base near Basra. Among the allegations is at least one case of male rape…

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U.S. intelligence: Time is running out in Afghanistan
Civilian and soldier deaths climb as colonial war grinds on
By: Stefanie Fisher
January 2, 2010 – According to the McClatchy news service, U.S. intelligence officials believe that “time is running out in Afghanistan.” The Pentagon-led colonial-style occupation of the country is in serious trouble. In 2009, 318 U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan, the highest yearly total of the war. Over 60 percent of the deaths resulted from improvised explosive device attacks. Resistance fighters carried off 7,228 IED attacks in 2009…

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44 US drone hits in Pakistan killed 700 civilians in 2009
The Peninsula.
January 2, 2010 -PESHAWAR: Of the 44 Predator strikes carried out by the American drones in the tribal areas of Pakistan in 12 months of 2009, only five were able to hit their actual targets, killing five key Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but at the cost of around 700 innocent civilian lives. According to the figures compiled by the Pakistani authorities, the Afghanistan-based US drones killed 708 people in 44 predator attacks targeting the Pakistani tribal areas between January 1 and December 31, 2009. For each Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by the American drones, 140 civilian Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 percent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were innocent civilians…

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U.S. Military Aid to Israel Averages $3 Billion a Year for Last 25 Years
AllGov.com.
January 2, 2010 – Washington’s generosity towards Israel has amounted to $3 billion a year in military aid since 1985, and extends even further back to the mid-20th century. According to a Congressional Research Service report, no other country has received more foreign assistance from the United States than Israel from World War II until now, and it was the largest annual recipient of U.S. foreign assistance for each year from 1976 to 2004, when Iraq became a high priority…

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Hamdouna: Prisoners Subjected to Unprecedented Abuses in Israeli Prisons
Middle East Monitor
January 2, 2010 – The Prisoners Studies Centre has expressed concerns that the administration of Israeli prisoners commits “unprecedented” abuses against Palestinian prisoners and their possessions, and that such abuses are often conducted under the pretext of security. The centre’s director, Mr Raafat Hamouda, disclosed in a press release that a special squad from the administration of the Nafha desert prison conducted, a few days ago, a “thorough and unprecedented” search of a cell occupied by eight detainees on the pretext that a cell phone was smuggled inside it. The Israeli squad then chained the prisoners and transferred them, without their possessions, to a canteen room that had been emptied for them…

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IRAN: Video shows gunman opening fire on demonstrators, who fight back
Los Angeles Times
January 2, 2010 – Iranian police have stated strenuously that security forces weren’t armed with guns during Dec. 27 clashes in Tehran between security forces and protesters. But newly discovered amateur video, apparently taken with a cellphone, tells a different story. In the video, a man can be seen and heard opening fire on a crowd of unarmed demonstrators as a man cries out, “Dishonorable Basiji!”…

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Gaza: Family’s lives torn apart in night of war
Erin Cunningham, Foreign Correspondent
January 2, 2010 – Thirty-three-year-old Wafa Awaja swats away the merciless flies as she talks in matter-of-fact sentences about the single night of war that took her eight-year-old son, crushed her home, and wounded both herself and her husband just one year ago. It was night-time on January 4 when a full-blown Israeli invasion of Gaza put her home, less than a kilometre from the border with Israel in the north, into the line of fire. Wafa, her husband Kamal, and her son Ibrahim were all shot as they fled the razing of their house by an Israeli tank, according to both Wafa and an account by Defence for Children International. With wounds to both his head and his abdomen, Ibrahim bled to death within minutes – it was his eighth birthday. A now-pregnant Wafa, Kamal and their remaining five children live in a makeshift fortress of donated tents on an empty plot in Gaza’s north, caught in an unlucky web of border politics and economics that is preventing any reconstruction of their home – and of the territory. “There’s no other place, where should we go?” asks Kamal. “The house we built on our own is gone. Now we are living with the dogs and the flies.”…

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Israeli jets attack Gaza
Aljazeera.English
January 2, 2010 – Israeli fighter jets have struck at two places in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli military said on Saturday that the raids, launched around midnight, targeted two tunnels, one east of Gaza City and another near Khan Younis. Witnesses also reported several other explosions around Gaza. The Israelis said these blasts had nothing to do with them. Local ambulances took four injured people from eastern Gaza for medical treatment, Palestinian medical sources said…

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An Introduction to Israel’s Blockade of Gaza
Don Emmerich
January 2, 2010 – The Gaza Strip is essentially a prison. That’s the best way to think of it. About two-thirds of Gaza is surrounded by a security fence that is patrolled by the Israeli Army. The rest of Gaza borders the Mediterranean Sea and is patrolled by the Israeli Navy. Israel destroyed the Strip’s only airport in 2001. So Israel, with the help of Egypt, completely controls who and what enters Gaza and who and what leaves Gaza. After Hamas took control of Gaza in June 2007, Israel began to sharply restrict the flow of people and goods entering and leaving the Strip. Because Gaza, like most small economies, depends upon foreign trade for its survival, this proved to be devastating…

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Gaza: Ministry of detainees calls on Red Cross to protect families of prisoners
Palestinian Information Center
January 2, 2010 – The Palestinian ministry of prisoners’ affairs appealed to international organizations especially the Red Cross, which oversees the visit program in Israeli jails, to take measures to protect the families of Palestinian prisoners from being assaulted by Israeli settlers. In a statement, information director of the ministry Riyadh Al-Ashqar expressed his deep concern over the safety of families of Palestinian prisoners in light of news reports talking about the intention of the parents of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and a number of settlers to close the roads leading to a number of Israeli jails and attack the families on their way to visit their sons…

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Record US aid goes on armaments
ANNE DAVIES, WASHINGTON
January 2, 2010 – JUST before Christmas, US President Barack Obama signed into law one of his country’s biggest aid pledges of the year. It was bound not for Africa or any of the many struggling countries on the World Bank’s list. It was a 10-year deal for $US2.77 billion ($A3.1 billion) to go to Israel in 2010 and a total of $US30 billion over the next decade, mainly to be spent on US military hardware. Despite the serious financial crisis in the US economy, the US is proceeding with its increased aid package to Israel…

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‘No one can take me away from Gaza’
Hamida Ghafour
January 2, 2010 – For weeks the defining image of Israel’s military siege of the Gaza Strip was a distant haze of smoke rising from the ground, sanitised footage that told nothing of the horrors of war. But in the late afternoon of January 16, Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish broke through the silence imposed by the Israeli government’s news blockade and for a few minutes the raw, unfathomable grief of a father whose three daughters and niece had been killed minutes before rang out to the world. “My God, my God can’t anyone help us please,” the prominent Palestinian doctor said in a telephone interview with Israel’s Channel 10 station as he pleaded for an ambulance and an end to the shelling of his house…

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Palestinian woman hospitalised after settler attack in Sheikh Jarrah
International Solidarity Movement (ISM)
January 2, 2010 – Nadia Al Kurd, from Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in Jerusalem was taken to hospital today after being attacked by an Israeli settler in her own garden. At around 2pm, Nadia al-Kurd, 65, was violently pushed by a settler in an unprovoked attack. The settler, one of those currently occupying her neighbours’ house, forced open the gate of her garden, pushing Nadia to the ground. She suffered from breathing difficulties immediately afterwards. Some of those present administered first aid, however, as her state required professional medical treatment, she had to be transported by an ambulance to the hospital. She was discharged later in the afternoon…

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UK bomb disposal expert killed in Afghanistan
Philippe Naughton
January 2, 2010 – An army bomb disposal expert has died from injuries he received in an explosion while helping to clear roadside bombs in Afghanistan on New Year’s Eve. The soldier, from 33 Engineer Regiment (Explosive Ordnance Disposal), Royal Engineers, died from wounds suffered in the blast near Patrol Base Blenheim, near Sangin, in Helmand Province, yesterday afternoon. His family has been informed although he has not yet been named…

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A Palestinian village caught amid illegal Israeli colonies
The head of the Palestinian village of Qariout can’t scan the horizon without being reminded of everything his people have lost.
AP
January 2, 2010 – The head of the Palestinian village of Qariout can’t scan the horizon without being reminded of everything his people have lost. From the roof of the village council building, Abdul Nasser Bedawi can see six of the nine Israeli colonies and outposts that have sprung up on the surrounding hills in the last three decades, fencing in the village and keeping it from two-thirds of its land…

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The Occupation indicts the director of “Jenin, Jenin” film
Middle East Monitor
January 2, 2010 – The Israeli Attorney General Menachem Mazuz is expected to file charges against the director of the film “Jenin, Jenin”, Mohammed Barki, for allegedly defaming Israeli soldiers. Mazuz met with State Prosecutor Moshe Lador and the chief of the Israel Defense Forces Armored Corps, Brigadier General Agai Yehezkel, as a representative of the soldiers who invaded the Jenin Refugee Camp in 2002; in addition to family members of the 13 soldiers killed during the attack…

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Video: Yemen newest front in ‘war on terror’?
Aljazeera.English
January 2, 2010 – Last year, Barack Obama, the US president, called Afghanistan the new frontline in America’s fight against al-Qaeda linked groups. Now Obama has explicitly linked the group al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula with the attempt to blow up a US-bound passenger jet on Christmas Day…

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Jewish settlers, IOF troops assault farmers, activists in Al-Khalil
Palestinian Information Center
January 2, 2010 — A number of Palestinian citizens were hurt when Jewish settlers assisted by Israeli occupation forces (IOF) assaulted them in Buwaira suburb near the settlement of Kiryat Arba in Al-Khalil on Friday. Local sources said that tens of farmers and foreign solidarity activists tried to plant trees in the area when the armed settlers and IOF soldiers attacked them.

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Vanunu: our duty to speak up
The absurd persecution of nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu did not relent on his release
Duncan Campbell
January 2, 2010 – More than five years ago, Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at the Israeli nuclear facility in Dimona, was released from prison after serving 18 years for revealing Israel’s nuclear weapons secrets. This week he was arrested again in Jerusalem, accused of talking to foreigners, in breach of conditions imposed on his release. It was in 1986 that Vanunu told his story to the Sunday Times and was lured to Italy by a Mossad agent, where he was drugged and sent back to Israel, charged with treason and espionage. He emerged from prison in 2004 believing even more passionately in a nuclear-free world, and non-violence as a solution to the problems in the Middle East…

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Baroud: The steel wall will cause environmental disasters for Gaza and Egypt
Palestinian Information Center
January 2, 2010 – Dr. Naim Baroud, a Palestinian professor of geography, warned that the building of the steel wall would cause environmental and health disasters for both the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and the Egyptian people in Sinai. In a press statement published Friday by Palestine newspaper, Dr. Baroud noted that Egypt’s underground aquifer in Sinai is shared with Gaza and fed by rainwater which flow from south to north and vice versa to feed all this inter-aquifer, adding that the steel wall would affect the flow of water into this basin…

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