R & R Cruising…
Layla Anwar
January 25, 2010 – There are many things I really need to write about. 1) Continue my post on the American plan in Iraq. Today over 3 bomb blasts, over 30 Iraqis dead, the execution of Ali Hassan Al Majeed, and a confirmation of a ban on secular and Sunni electoral candidates. So you had enough time to think about what the American plan for Iraq is. So what is it ? No one has managed to answer that question yet…and don’t you dare utter the word democracy in front of me…

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THEY GOT THE WRONG GUYS
Malcom Lagauche
January 25, 2010 – On Monday, January 25, 2010, Ali Hassain al-Majid, better known as “Chemical Ali” was hanged by Iranian-backed Iraqi stooges. Slightly more than thee years ago, Iraq’s President, Saddam Hussein, was executed as well be the same Iran-lovers. Both shared the dubious title of having gassed Iraq’s Kurdish population at Halabjah in 1988. However, few people in the West checked out any facts to verify the guilt or innocence of the two Iraqi leaders…

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The Silence and the Shield: Depraved Indifference to the Atrocities of Power
Chris Floyd
January 25, 2010 – Scott Horton draws tellingly on Auden and Homer in this follow-up to his remarkable piece, “The Guantanamo ‘Suicides’,” the story of three captives – all of them innocent men, cleared for later release – who were almost certainly murdered in a secret site in the American concentration camp in 2006, apparently for protesting prison conditions. (We examined Horton’s story here.) The men were evidently killed during “strenuous interrogation” — i.e., they had rags stuffed down their throat while being beaten. When they died, a ludicrous story of a mutual suicide pact — under impossible physical conditions — was concocted by American authorities, complete with outright lies about the men being “hardcore” terrorists who killed themselves as an act of “asymmetrical warfare.” The cover-up of these killings goes up to the highest levels of the U.S. government – and it continues most forcefully to this day under the Obama Administration. It is a sickening — but most instructive — story…

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But The Wall Stopped The Suicide Bombings And Wouldn’t You Want A Wall If Your Neighbors Were Trying To Kill You etc etc etc
Lawrence of Cyberia
January 25, 2010 – I see that Adam at Mondoweiss has written a post today about the Separation Wall in the West Bank, and the cost it imposes on the people who live there. Whenever you see a blog post on the subject, it is virtually guaranteed that someone will show up with the boilerplate response about how its’s not really a wall it’s more a fence because part of it is made of barbed wire and besides it’s all for security reasons and it stopped the suicide bombings so what are you anyway some kind of anti-semite who’d rather see Jews dead and anyway you’d want a wall too if your neighbors wanted to kill you… To which the answer is this…

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Focus on Haiti: Washington’s Militarized Takeover
by Stephen Lendman
January 25, 2010 – Haiti is no stranger to adversity and anguish – over 500 years of severe oppression, slavery, despotism, colonization, reparations, embargoes, sanctions, deep poverty, starvation, unrepayable debt, and natural calamities from destructive hurricanes to a dozen magnitude 7.0 or greater Caribbean region earthquakes in the past 500 years. The last major one was in 1946 at 8.1 in the adjacent Dominican Republic, also striking Haiti. Earlier catastrophic ones were in 1751 and 1770, both devastating Port-au-Prince, and the 1842 one destroying Cap-Haitien in the north… After its worst catastrophe in nearly 170 years, millions in the country need everything, not Marines – food, water, medical care, shelter, and deep compassion at their greatest time of need. Instead, the country is occupied, militarized, denied aid, and taken over for greater exploitation. General Ken Keen, in charge of forces, says US troops will “be here as long as needed,” signaling an open-ended commitment for years…

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Iran banks have $48 bln in bad loans -cbank
Maktoob Business
January 25, 2010 – Iran’s state-dominated banking system has $48 billion in non-performing loans and it is on the verge of a crisis, the Islamic Republic’s central bank governor said in comments published on Monday. “How would it be possible for the banking system to show any profit with $48 billion worth of loans in arrears,” the Ettelaat newspaper quoted Governor Mahmoud Bahmani as saying. Referring to a lending spree in recent years, he said: “Of course, the reality must be accepted that the opening up of the banking system’s resources sack in the past few years has brought them (the banks) to the brink of crisis.”…

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‘This is our village!’ – a report from Nabi Saleh
Adam Horowitz
January 25, 2010 – The following is a shocking video from Nabi Saleh, a Palestinian village of 500 residents located north of Ramallah. The village has been engaged in growing demonstrations during the past few weeks to protest the illegal seizure of valuable agricultural land by the Hallamish (Neve Tzuf) settlement. Settlers have also recently uprooted of hundreds of the village’s olive trees.You can find more on the recent protests in Nabi Saleh at Ibn Ezra…

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Remembering Al-Hakim George Habash: A Revolutionary Life, a tribute to the great Palestinian Arab leader
Yousef Abudayyeh
January 25, 2010 – Commemorating the second anniversary of the death of Al-Hakim George Habash, we reprint three articles published in homage to this great man who remains an inspiration and a source for millions. The first briefly recounts the legacy of this great man, the second is an interview in which Dr. Habash in his own words describes the decisive moment of his life and the third is a tribute delivered in London by the Communist Party…

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Gaza: the last oranges
Eva Barlett, In Gaza
January 25, 2010 – “Children don’t lie. Slap them in the face and they tell you what they know,” Sameh*, a night watchman, says. The 18 year old was on night shift at Maowwiya elementary school north of Attatra’s Salateen street, Beit Lahiya, when the Israeli land invasion began. Three days after the 18 January 2009 ceasefire, still shaken from his experience, Sameh recounted how the Israelis occupied the school and used it as a prison and interrogation centre, before bombing it. A year later, the blast holes still gape through the school’s walls and the missing floor has not been replaced. “It was around 8am, January 4th, the first morning of the ground invasion. Israeli tanks came to the school. I started to run but the Israeli soldiers ordered me to stop. They pointed their guns at me and told me to take off my clothes.”…

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Gaza Power Station To Shut Down By This Weekend
Saed Bannoura
January 25, 2010 – Gaza’s only power plant may close by the end of this week due to the European Union’s decision to stop buying fuel to power the plant. According to Rafeeq Maliha, director of the power plant in Gaza, “The EU, since November, has stopped funding the diesel purchase for the station.” Maliha warns that without intervention from the Palestinian Authority, the densely populated Gaza Strip will be without many basic services that require an adequate amount of electricity…

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Obama Administration’s Use of Drones Responsible for Increase in Civilian Deaths
William Fisher
January 25, 2010 – The Obama administration is ramping up its use of drone unmanned aircraft to execute targeted killings in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and perhaps in other locations – and, in the process, killing civilians along with insurgents, and risking the compromise of US moral imperatives and foreign policy goals. That’s the view of a leading civil rights organization, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), calling on the president to lift the curtain of secrecy and level with the American people…

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Agents of Imperial Terror: Aggression and the Goldstone Report
By Jennifer Loewenstein – Madison, WI
January 25, 2010 – …Operation Cast Lead, code name for the US-backed Israeli military offensive against the people of Gaza from December 27th, 2008 to January 18th, 2009, killed over 1,400 people, 85% of them civilians and nearly 400 of them children; it wounded over 5300 people; it devastated the agricultural, industrial and environmental infrastructures of the Gaza Strip, and further gutted the Gazan social and political foundations of what should have been by now one area of a vibrant and viable modern Palestinian state. Instead Gaza, like the other sections of this hacked up land, lies drained of its lifeblood like a severed limb. Its past recalls shockingly brutal years of occupation, torture, degradation and mutilation by an aggressor granted immunity from the principles of world order. But Israel’s exemption from the primary tenets of international law flows straight out of the self-exemption from those same laws that its imperial overlord, the United States, has insisted upon for itself in global affairs…

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Israel Likely to Join OECD in 2010: “If You Have Enough Money, We’ll Call You a Democracy”
Shir Hever
January 25, 2010 – General Secretary of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Angel Gurria, visited Israel last week (18-20 January 2010) to launch two new OECD reports: an Economic Survey of Israel and a Review of Israel’s Labour Market and Social Policies. At this time Gurria announced that Israel’s accession to the OECD is likely to occur within the coming six months. Connie Hackbarth spoke with Shir Hever, Economic Researcher of the AIC, to better understand what this means…

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Haitian police shoot scavengers indiscriminately
AFP
January 25, 2010 — Haitian police on Monday shot indiscriminately at scavengers and looters in Port-au-Prince, hitting two in the head as post-quake security deteriorated, an AFP photographer reported. A group of police, pushed to keep control among a desperate population after the January 12 tremor which killed or injured many of their number and destroyed the city prison, opened fire on a warehouse from a building opposite. An AFP photographer inside the scavengers’ building said two men were hit in the head, one of whom received medical attention…

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Iraq: Sunnis scramble for allies
By Sami Moubayed
January 25, 2010 – United States President Joseph Biden landed in Baghdad on Friday amid speculation that he might help hammer out differences between Sunnis and Shi’ites ahead of Iraq’s March 7 parliamentary elections. Sunni politicians are furious at having a number of their candidates disqualified by the Accountability and Justice Committee, with the silent blessing of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The list of 511 banned candidates in fact includes more Shi’ite politicians than Sunnis, but a number of senior Sunnis are included. According to reports from Baghdad, the blacklist could snowball to include 6,000 candidates, with many more former Ba’athists and secular Sunnis who are challenging Maliki’s State of Law Coalition included. Biden made it plain, though, that he would not get involved…

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IRAQI GOVT URGES PARLIAMENT TO CRIMINALIZE EX-BAATH REGIME
KUNA
January 25, 2010 – The Iraqi government has called on parliament to issue a legislation that criminalize whoever glorifies deeds and crimes of the defunct Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Government spokesman Ali Dabbagh said Sunday parliament should consider that glorifying the former Baath regime a crime in order to protect the democratic regime…

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Goldstone documented nightmarish case of a Palestinian ‘human shield’
Adam Horowitz
January 25, 2010 – The Israeli government is starting to go all out in its war against the Goldstone Report. Israel is planning on issuing its response to the report this Thursday, and it seems Israel is aided by the fact that so few people have actually read the contents of the report itself. We will be posting segments from the report to make them more accessible to the public (you can find the entire report here). Hopefully the better the report is known, the better Israel will be held accountable. The following story is found of pages 281-287 of the report..

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IRAQ – The Ghost of Paul Bremer Strikes Again: Nine Entities Banned with Reference to CPA Order 97
Reidar Visser
January 25, 2010 – The Iraqi elections commission (IHEC) has earlier queried the constitutional court about the relationship between excluded party leaders and the entities they represent. Last December it asked whether it would be constitutional to ban an entity if its leader were excluded; the court replied it did not want to issue an opinion on this and said the matter rested with the IHEC. It was subsequently rumoured that the accountability and justice board wanted to exclude between 10 and 15 entities, and it was thought that there might be an attempt at linking the banning of entity heads and their entire parties. Today, the IHEC has acted in a bolder fashion. Referring to section 5 of CPA order 97 from 2004, they have cancelled the approval of 9 entities previously slated to take part in the elections…

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Iran’s Opposition Leaders Soften Tone on Election
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
January 25, 2010 — Two of Iran’s opposition leaders, Mohammed Khatami and Mehdi Karroubi, appear to have dropped their demand for a new presidential election, saying that while they still believe the vote in June was fraudulent, they accept Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the head of state, according to Iranian news services. The statements from Mr. Karroubi, a former presidential candidate and speaker of Parliament, and Mr. Khatami, a former president, follow the lead of Mir Hussein Moussavi, another opposition leader, who on New Year’s Eve criticized the government, but offered a prescription for solving the political crisis which for the first time did not include holding a new vote…

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Karroubi recognises Ahmadinejad as Iran ‘president’: son
AFP
January 25, 2010 – Iranian opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi who had refused to accept the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, now recognises the hardliner as the country’s “president”, Karroubi’s son told AFP on Monday. Hossein Karroubi quoted his father as saying: “I am still of the same belief that the election was unhealthy and massively rigged. But since the (supreme) leader (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) endorsed (Ahmadinejad’s victory), I believe that he is the head of the government, meaning he is the president.”…

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Gaza families fight to visit relatives in Israeli prisons
Rami Almeghari
January 25, 2010 – Umm Faris Baroud of Shati refugee camp in western Gaza City wakes up early every Monday in the hope that she will be allowed to visit her son Faris, serving a life sentence in one of Israel’s prisons. With poor knees and a stooped back, Umm Faris, aged 88, moved slowly as she welcomed us to her modest home. “For the past two and a half years I have been able to visit Faris,” she explained. “Every Monday, I participate in a weekly protest along with many other families including mothers, wives and children of detainees, at the office of the International Committee of the Red Cross [ICRC]. We demand a fair right: seeing our beloved children.”…

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