URGENT UPDATE : Iraqi Female Writer/Blogger Hiba Al-Shamaree.
Layla Anwar
January 31, 2010 – Following my previous post here, I just received this fresh information regarding Hiba Al-Shamaree this fellow Iraqi woman writer/blogger who has been kidnapped/arrested by the Iraqi forces on the 20th of January 2010 in the Sayyediya neighborhood in Baghdad. Her sister has just updated her blog with the following : Hiba Al-Shamaree is detained by Baghdad’s security forces on the charges of supporting the Iraqi Resistance (through her writings), she will be presented to the Criminal/Penal Court… I am now authorized by Hiba to reveal her true identity to you. Her name : Hanan Ali Ahmad Al Mashadani. Age : 33 years old. Profession: Doctor in Ophtalmology. The charges pressed against her : Inciting to violence and supporting the Resistance and according to informed sources this is a charge that falls under the clause of Terrorism as per the Iraqi law…PLEASE, THIS IS AN URGENT PLEA — THEY WILL DESTROY HER. THEY WILL PUT HER THROUGH THE MOST HORRENDOUS OF TORTURES, including RAPE. I KNOW WHAT AM TALKING ABOUT. I KNOW. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE HELP. CONTACT ANYONE YOU CAN. HIBA’S ONLY CRIME IS HOLDING A BLOG. THAT’S ALL…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62781

We are All Palestine
Reham Alhelsi
January 31, 2010 – …Growing up, we too had our heroes. These were Palestinians who, regardless of their political affiliation, were sincere in their fight for a free Palestine and worked solely towards achieving that goal. Among others, our heroes included the martyrs, the people who made the ultimate sacrifice for Palestine. We would distribute their posters everywhere, would hang these posters on our bedrooms walls, would celebrate their eternal life for they are alive and will continue to stay alive carved in the collective national memory of Palestinians as long as there are Palestinians walking this earth. These were and still are the heroes of the Palestinian people, regardless of their political affiliation. There is no Palestinian, whether in occupied Palestine or in the Diaspora, who doesn’t know Ghassan Kanafani, Dalal Al-Mughrabi, Naji Al-Ali, Lina Al-Nabulsi, and many many others more. We refer to them when we talk about Palestine, we sing about them, we write about them and we add their photos to our facebook account, to our twitter account and to our blogs and sites. These heroes are not Fateh’s heroes, nor PFLP’s heroes nor DFLP’s heroes, they are OUR heroes; the heroes of Palestine…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62788

Video: Gaza residents denied eye treatment
Aljazeera.English
January 31, 2010 – Aid agencies have warned that Israel’s blockade of Gaza is putting the health of many Palestinians at risk. Last week, Israeli authorities have prevented 19 patients from crossing over to Ramallah in the West Bank, which is Palestinian territory, for cornea implants that could save their sight. Ayman Mohyeldin reports from Gaza on the harmful effects of a blockade that has no end in sight.

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62789

Plan to oust Saddam drawn up two years before the invasion
Secret document signalled support for Iraqi dissidents and promised aid, oil and trade deals in return for regime change
Michael Savage,
January 31, 2010 – A secret plan to foster an internal coup against Saddam Hussein was drawn up by the Government two years before the invasion of Iraq, The Independent can reveal. Whitehall officials drafted the “contract with the Iraqi people” as a way of signalling to dissenters in Iraq that an overthrow of Saddam would be supported by Britain. It promised aid, oil contracts, debt cancellations and trade deals once the dictator had been removed. Tony Blair’s team saw it as a way of creating regime change in Iraq even before the 9/11 attack on New York. The document, headed “confidential UK/US eyes”, was finalised on 11 June 2001 and approved by ministers. It has not been published by the Iraq inquiry but a copy has been obtained by The Independent and can be revealed for the first time today…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62799

Welcoming the Taliban with Open Arms: Defectors and Deception in Afghanistan
by Douglas Valentine
January 31, 2010 – This week, the U.S. Government began floating the idea of welcoming low and mid-level Taliban defectors into its war on terror against Al Qaeda. After waging an eight-year “dirty war” against the Taliban, U.S. military commanders and politicians are publicly acknowledging their “insurgent” enemy is actually part of the “fabric” of Afghan society. U.S. and NATO officials are also offering bribes from a billion dollar “Peace and Reintegration Trust Fund” to Taliban fighters to defect. Taliban leaders have condemned the buyout strategy as a “trick” to divide and conquer its forces, and said that offers of reconciliation were futile without a withdrawal of foreign troops. This billion dollar buyout may, indeed, seem a bizarre reversal of fortunes, but only if one believes the U.S. genuinely wants reconciliation with the Taliban. In reality, defectors programs like the one proposed for Afghanistan are an essential part of the traditional U.S. pacification policy. For example, the so-called Chieu Hoi “Open Arms” program is touted by military historians as having produced positive results throughout the Vietnam War by offering “clemency to insurgents.” Make no mistake about it: this too is propaganda. Defector “amnesty” or “clemency” or “open arms” programs are aggressive CIA intelligence operations and have nothing to do with reconciliation…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62801

The impact of the Zionist projet on Palestine and the region
Roland Rance
January 30, 2010 – Since the start of the second Intifada in Palestine, we have seen the collapse of imperialism’s Plan B for the region. Plan A had been simply to allow Israel to hold on to the territories it occupied in 1967. Following the first Intifada, it became clear that this approach was not viable, and a new plan “B” was adopted. This Plan B proposed the establishment of something that could be presented as a Palestinian state – alongside the state of Israel. We know that it would have been nothing of the sort: the proposed Palestinian state would have had NO control of its own borders or airspace, NO armed forces, been unable to absorb the Palestinian refugees, and crucially, have had NO control of its water resources. But this Plan B has been the position of the imperialists, supported verbally by most Arab regimes and the Israeli government for the last several years. Now this approach has collapsed and it appears that imperialism has no fall-back plan, instead reverting to a revised version of Plan A which gives Israel carte blanche in the region…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62786

PCHR Expresses Deep Concern over Attacks by Police Officers on Participants in PFLP’s Festival
PCHR – Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
January 31, 2010 – The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) expresses its deep concern over attacks by police officers on a number of participants in a festival organized by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) on Friday, 29 January 2010, in Al-Boreij refugee camp. PCHR stresses that the right to peaceful assembly and the right to freedom of opinion and expression are fundamental human rights ensured by the Basic Law and international human rights instruments…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62787

NATO says Afghan baby killed during night raid operation in central Afghanistan
Associated Press
January 31, 2010 – NATO says an Afghan baby has been killed and a woman was wounded during a NATO-Afghan night raid operation targeting militants in central Afghanistan. According to a statement from the international force, the casualties occurred Saturday when the joint force came under fire from several locations as it approached a compound in Uruzgan province, prompting a gunbattle…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62804

Abuse at All Levels on Iraqi’s
Afif Sarhan
January 31, 2010 – Living in a displacement camp with his two daughters, Mustafa Omary, 31, was a victim ofUS violence in Iraq. Arrested for three months, he suffered serious torture, and was accused of having ties with local resistance groups. All of this was for being caught speaking with a supposed member of a resistance group, who happened to be his relative, unaware of his involvement. Omary suffered serious abuses including rape, electrical shock and was forced to see pages of the holy Qur’an being torn apart in front of his eyes. After his release, he lost his wife a week after. His wife committed suicide; she had told him that she was raped by two US soldiers while trying to visit him in prison and could not stand this shame which has now been placed on her family: this ultimately drove her to ingest a high quantity of rat poison…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62796

Iran: Two Bloggers in Danger of Death
Hamid Tehrani
January 31, 2010 – Two bloggers and members of the “Committee of Human Rights” (Chrr), Mehrdad Rahimi and Kouhyar Goudarzi (photographed above: Goudarzi, left, and Rahimi, right) have been accused of wanting to wage “a war against God,” and charged as being “Mohareb” (enemies of God). Their charges are similar to those against the two men who were executed this week in Tehran. Reporters without Borders writes other bloggers who are members of the committee have also been arrested in recent weeks. They are Parisa Kakei, who was arrested on January 2; Shiva Nazar Ahari on December 24; and Said Kanaki and Said Jalali on December 1. They are all still being held in Section 209 of Tehran’s notorious Evin prison and are being subjected to considerable pressure to name other members of the committee and to call for it to be disbanded…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62798

America Strikes Again: The Continued Violation of Haitian Humanity
Maziki Thame
January 31, 2010 – René Préval sold Haiti to the USA for US$100 million. The Americans’ pledge of US$100 million in assistance to Haiti following the earthquake disaster of January 12 must have sealed the agreement for US control over Haiti. The Americans have been deeply embedded in Haitian politics from its independence, through various dictatorships and throughout its fragile democratisation. A commitment to Haitian democratisation has never been a priority for America. They opposed Aristide because democracy for him, and for the masses he represented, meant a transformation of the way Haiti did politics — aimed historically at the exclusion and impoverishment of the majority of Haitian people…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62795

Is the EU Helping Mossad to Commit International Terror?
Kawther Salam
January 31, 2010 – On past 20 January, Mohammad Al-Mabhouh was assassinated in a hotel in Dubai by Mossad people holding EU passports. According to the press, four to seven Israeli Mossad death squads assassinated Al-Mabhouh in his hotel room at the Al-Bostan, Rotana hotel in Dubai. The Mossad injected Al-Mabhouh with a drug which leads to a heart attack. They made copies of all documents he had, and then left his room after hanging a sign on the door with the words “Please do not disturb.”

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62794

The Collateral Repair Project
Hussein Al-alak, The Iraq Solidarity Campaign
January 31, 2010 – Collateral Damage” (a euphemism if ever there was one) doesn’t stop with the coalition’s last bomb, the draw-down of US troops or the so-called open elections in Iraq. “Collateral Damage” keeps on “going” to its victims. 1 in 5 Iraqis are displaced Between 500,000 and 1 million are in Jordan. The Collateral Repair Project is a grassroots movement, created in Jordan, to address the catastrophic displacement of the five million Iraqis who had to leave behind their homes and communities because of the violence and instability, that is the result of the invasion and occupation of their country…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62800

Chilcot War Inquiry: Professor to launch ‘Nuremberg’ war crimes prosecution against Blair
By Glen Owen
January 31, 2010 – Plans to bring a war crimes prosecution against Tony Blair based on last week’s bombshell evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry have been launched by a leading law professor. Professor Bill Bowring says the revelation that the Government rejected Foreign Office warnings not to invade Iraq means there is a good chance Mr Blair can be ‘investigated, at the very least’ for war crimes. ‘We now know that the Government was explicitly warned beforehand that the UK risked being prosecuted for going to war,’ said Prof Bowring. Professor Bowring has launched plans to bring a war crimes prosecution against Tony Blair…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62806

Israel army to reoccupy base near Bethlehem
Ma’an News
January 31, 2010 – Israel’s army plans to reoccupy an abandoned military base near Bethlehem, security sources said on Sunday, in a move certain to please settlers seeking to establish themselves in the district. An Israeli military source told Ma’an that the army will rebuild parts of a base in Beit Sahour known as Oush Al-Ghrab “in order to ensure security in the area, according to all of the estimates of officials in the IDF [Israel Defense Forces].”…Beit Sahour Mayor Hani Al-Hayek told Ma’an that “the Israeli occupation forces say they withdrew from the base in April 2006, but they didn’t leave it completely. Settlers, on an ongoing basis, go there every Friday.” He added: “If they [the army] intend to reoccupy it, as in the past, this would harm the peace process and further divide the two parties, as well as inflame public opinion” against negotiations with Israel. According to the mayor’s legal advisor, Farid Al-Atrash, “This plan constitutes a violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit moving populations into occupied territory. It is also a violation of signed agreements with the [Palestinian] Authority.”..

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62793

Eight Children Hospitalised in Nabi Saleh Siege
Palestine Monitor
January 31, 2010 – Around twenty residents of Nabi Salah village were injured during Friday’s demonstration, directed mainly at the Hallamish settlement which occupies the village’s farmland and primary water source. Most of those injured were children not participating in the protest, tear gassed and fired upon with rubber bullets as they sheltered in a nearby house…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62805

In the West Bank’s stony hills, Palestine is slowly dying
Robert Fisk
January 31, 2010 – Area C doesn’t sound very ominous. A land of stone-sprinkled grey hills and soft green valleys, it’s part of the wreckage of the equally wrecked Oslo Agreement, accounting for 60 per cent of the Israeli-occupied West Bank that was eventually supposed to be handed over to its Palestinian inhabitants. But look at the statistics and leaf through the pile of demolition orders lying on the table in front of Abed Kasab, head of the village council in Jiftlik, and it all looks like ethnic cleansing via bureaucracy. Perverse might be the word for the paperwork involved. Obscene appear to be the results. Palestinian houses that cannot be permitted to stand, roofs that must be taken down, wells closed, sewage systems demolished; in one village, I even saw a primitive electricity system in which Palestinians must sink their electrical poles cemented into concrete blocks standing on the surface of the dirt road…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62791

A DAY WITH AN EVICTED FAMILY IN OCCUPIED EAST JERUSALEM
Steve Amsel, Deserpeace
January 31, 2010 – We spent the day in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem today. 28 Palestinian refugee families are at the threat of being evicted from their homes to become refugees again. Four families have already been evicted and thrown out on the streets of Sheikh Jarrah by Settlers with the support of the Israeli government – Police and Military involved. The story of these internally displaced refugees is heartbreaking. Listen to Nasir as he shares with us the background of what is happening in Sheikh Jarrah…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62790

Palestinian People’s Party (PPP): Hamas placing Gazans under house arrest
Ma’an News
January 31, 2010 – The Palestinian People’s Party (PPP) on Saturday criticized the de facto government for the restrictions it has placed on the freedom of movement of Palestinians in and out of Gaza. Member of the PPP’s politburo, Nafith Ghneim, described the recent decision to prevent the entry of Fatah leaders into the besieged strip without permission from the Gaza government as illegal, a violation of Palestinian law and basic human rights. “Hamas’ decision that citizens need permission in advance to leave the Gaza Strip means that all citizens are under house arrest. How can any Gazan accept this while the Gaza Strip is suffering from a crippling Israeli siege, which everyone is exerting all efforts to get rid of,” Ghneim said in a statement…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62809

Murders at Guantánamo: Scott Horton and Andy Worthington talk to Jeff Farias
Andy Worthington
January 31, 2010 – …I explained the outline of the story, which focuses on the testimony of Army Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman and three other members of the US military, who have presented a coherent explanation for how the men were, in fact, taken to a secret facility outside the main perimeter fence of Guantánamo on the evening of June 9, 2006, where they died — either accidentally, as a result of torture that went too far, or because they were murdered. According to this account, the corpses were then returned to Camp Delta, where the triple suicide story was subsequently concocted. Once Scott joined in, he provided further details, and we also discussed how disappointing it is that the story has been almost completely ignored in the mainstream media in America. I also talked about the testimony of the British resident Shaker Aamer, who told his attorneys that he was brutally tortured on the same evening…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62802

Ahmadinejad a progressive? Ahamdi’s anti-imperialism is a myth and so are his leftist credentials
Network of Iranian Labor Unions (NILU)
January 30, 2010 – There is a fiction going about in some progressive circles around the world according to which Ahmadinejad is a great nationalist crusader, that he is a champion of the poor and that he is a man of the people. This is certainly shocking to the ears of most Iranians (including many Iranian workers) who consider their president to be a demagogue and a petty dictator. Let’s look at the facts in detail…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=62780