US Army chief sees Iraq, Afghanistan occupations continuing for a decade
By Bill Van Auken
The chief of staff of the US Army, Gen. George Casey, said this week that the American military is preparing to continue its interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan for at least another decade. In an invitation-only interview Tuesday with selected reporters and think tank representatives, Casey said that the protracted US occupation of the two countries was necessary in order to meet a “sustained US commitment to fighting extremism an d terrorism in the Middle East,” the Associated Press reported…
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Afghan Resistance Statement
A New American Chief Executive and the Election Drama
Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan
The Americans have launched a ridiculous chess game about their stooges, tapping them on the back to run for the president. Even, US president Obama invited some of them to participate in a swearing-in ceremony at the White House. By such gestures, Obama intended to show that he wanted to get a particular agent installed at the saddle of power in Afghanistan and end the Karzai corruption-ridden Administration. However, it did not transpire. After the passage of some time, the promise was just forgotten. Like his other pledges, commitments which proved to be bogus, superficial and deceiving, it also proved to be so. Soon the Afghan guests at the oath-taking ceremony fell from sight. Instead, a deal was struck with Karzai, the mayor of Kabul, who ostensibly promised to obey every order and demand of the new American president Obama…
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Note: literature is illegal in Palestine
Marcy Newman, body on the line
I went to the last night of the Palestine Festival of Literature expecting that it would be shut down yet again. A friend of mine in the old city had bumped into one of the actors in al Hakawati (the Palestinian national theatre) and she told him that they were already planning to move it somewhere else. But when i went there to meet him everything was getting set up so it seemed that this was just a rumor. I arrived an hour early because my friends a re in a book discussion group every thursday night so i went to join them as i sometimes do. but five minutes after they got started israeli terrorist soldiers invaded al hakawati. They came in and posted a court order in Hebrew and Arabic on the door and asked everyone to leave the theatre. My friends decided they would carry on their book discussion group in the courtyard so they sat down outside on theatre grounds. then they were told they also were not allowed to be there…
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America seeks to destroy Pakistan
Atif Salahuddin
… America itself has failed to control Afghanistan; it badly needs the Pakistan army to conduct this operation to save it’s failing occupation of Afghanistan. This operation is designed by the Zardari regime to punish the people of Swat for their support to the fighters who attack the American and NATO supply convoys heading for Afghanistan and for their Pakhtoon brethren across the border who are fighting the American led occupation. By displacing up to a staggering 2.4 million people from the area, the Zardari regime, coupled with the terror of the American drone strikes in the area, has effectively cleansed the area of it’s population and thereby sought to increase the security of the American and NATO supply lines. By creating an area free from it’s population, the Zardari regime has also created a buffer zone along the Afghan border in order to stem Western losses inside Afghanistan. In the process Zardari has created the biggest humanitarian refugee crisis the world has seen since the Rwanda genocide in 1994 according to the United Nations. With no independent journalists allowed inside the theatre of operation, it is anyone’s guess as to how many men, women and children have died, how many have been injured and how many have lost their homes and had their livelihoods destroyed in the process. ..
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Fake Rape Photos Re-Emerge Again To Discredit Real Torture Scandal
Paul Joseph Watson
Staged photos lifted from porn websites purporting to be images of U.S. troops raping female detainees at Abu Ghraib are again circulating at the height of the torture scandal, discrediting the very real and admitted accounts of rape described in Major General Antonio Taguba’s military report into the Abu Ghraib prison. Despite the fact that these photos were vehemently discredited and proven to be taken from porn websites when they firs t emerged in 2004, they are again being erroneously cited as examples of photos showing rape that the Obama administration is blocking from public release – providing debunkers with ammunition to dismiss the validity of the torture scandal altogether….We see the same pattern over and over again – every time the torture scandal escalates, fake images are released to poison the well and dampen outrage about the very real torture and sexual abuse of women and children that is documented in the U.S. military’s own internal report into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The fact that Press TV and the individual quoted in the article have fallen for this simplistic propaganda yet again is beyond belief. It’s a case of ‘fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me…
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A Two-State Scam?
By Mohannad El-Khairy
… The bottom line is this: the very intention of the state of Israel is to take over the entire country, and ethnically cleanse its native population. There was never an Israeli intent to live side by side, let alone with, the Palestinians. Since inception, Eretz Israel – or Greater Israel – was and continues to be the ultimate objective. Israel’s end game is to render the Palestinians like the Native Americans of North America; a forgotten, scattered people with no chance of regai ning its homeland, let alone build on its rich heritage and culture. In fact, it already uses Palestinian traditional attire, foods, music, and dance as part of the “ethnically diverse Israeli nation” – a nation built on the stolen identity of another…
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The Pathologies of Israel’s Guilty Conscience
Eitan Bronstein
Negating the truth about the Nakbah — the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs from what became Israel in 1948 — has been a staple of Jewish-nationalist propaganda as long as I can remember: As a youngster in Habonim, I was told bubbemeis tales about foolish Arabs marching off into the wilderness like zombies after being hypnotized by radio broadcasts urging them to leave; a “miracle” on a par with the parting of the Red Sea that ostensibly gave the Zionist mo vement the “land without a people” about which it had fantasized. It should have been painfully obvious that this was a preposterous self-serving myth (which even then didn’t account for the fact that the ethnic cleansing was sealed by Israel in one of its founding laws that denied the right of any Arab absent from their property on the day of Israel’s creation to return to that property). But to suggest anything less than a miraculous conception and bloodless birth for the state of Israel was to deny its “legitimacy”, we were told. As international pressure grows for an historic reckoning between Israelis and Palestinians, the frenzy of denial and negation has intensified. Suddenly, Netanyahu is demanding that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a “Jewish state”, even though to do so requires that Palestinian refugees simply sign away their birthright, erase their history and identity. Even more bizarre, perhaps, is the effort by members of Israel’s parliament to outlaw commemorati on of the Nakba…
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Israel Threatens to Outlaw Palestinian Memory
By Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler
Israel is set to approve a radical new bill which threatens to legalise discrimination against its sizeable Arab minority for the first time. The bill, approved this week by the ministerial committee for legislation, would make it illegal to relate to the creation of the State of Israel on May 15, 1948 as a day of mourning, thereby banning Arab Israeli citizens from marking what Palestinians call the Nakba – their “Great Catastrophe”. A lthough the bill has some way yet to become law, it is already arousing considerable consternation among liberal Israeli Jews and the entire Arab community, 20 percent of Israel’s population…
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Death and devastation in Gaza neatly filed and documented
Peter Beaumont
We have a way of codifying the consequences of conflict. We collect the dead into lists and tidy ruins into databases. We map gravesites and calculate the cost. It is a process that produces sums and totals, graphs and tables, which in the end are far less meaningful than the reality of what occurred. It numbs and dehumanises even as the gathering is done. In Gaza the shells of buildings have been labelled and collated, exhibits from a violent event already passing into history after only half a year. G1086-01 designates the parliament building, a collapsed grey ribcage of concrete. The site of the ruined ministries in the Tal al-Hawa district of Gaza City is recorded as G10177-01, green and grey towers gutted by the bombs dropped from Israeli F-16s…
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The Borg Welcomes Its New Members
Arthur Silber
… Yet I do not believe in holding grudges. So to many of those who voted for Obama, including all those liberals and progressives who now not only fail to oppose his policies of barbarism and death but cheer themselves hoarse with shouts of approval for ongoing murder and destruction (see the Laura Flanders article excerpted here), as well as to all those who attempt to minimize or find excuses for the many crimes of today and tomorrow, I say:Congratulations. Your assimila tion has been successful. You are now part of the Hive Mind. Some of us saw all this, and we therefore declined to vote for Obama. For identical reasons, we refused to vote for McCain. “A Choice of War Criminals” is no choice at all, not if one values innocent life and the honor of being human. But many of those who insisted that all “decent” people must vote for Obama dismissed our concerns, or attempted to marginalize and minimize them. They said we weren’t “realistic.” To all such people, I say: you yourselves were certainly “realistic.” I would suggest that one other element of what now unfolds is also realistic: the blood that drips from your hands, and the nightmares that ought to sear your souls. There’s realism for you, you miserable sons of bitches…
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Taguba Saw “Video of Male Soldier Sodomizing Female Detainee”
Jason Leopold
In 2007, shortly after he was forced into retirement, Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba made a startling admission. During the course of his investigation into the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Taguba said he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” Taguba told New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh that he saw other graphic photos and videos as well, including one depicting the “sexual humiliation of a fathe r with his son, who were both detainees.” That video, as well as photographs Taguba saw of US soldiers raping and torturing Iraqi prisoners, remains in the possession of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID). Taguba said he did not discuss details of the photographs and videos in his voluminous report on abuses at Abu Ghraib because of the Army’s ongoing criminal probe and the photographs’ “extremely sensitive nature.”…
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Torture photos: US soldiers raped, sodomized Iraqi prisoners
By Tom Eley
… One can only react with horror. Contained in the stories and images of the torture of defenseless prisoners, some of them boys and women, is the true face of US imperialism, which finds no crime beneath its dignity in its effort to subjugate Iraq and Afghanistan. Just as the Vietnam War conjures up images of napalmed children fleeing US soldiers, and Nazi Germany invokes images of emaciated prisoners near death, the images of sexual torture will f orever be associated with the American “war on terror.” In acting to suppress the images and protect the torturers, Obama has made himself an accomplice in these crimes. Moreover, in the absence of criminal investigation, there is every reason to believe that similar crimes continue in Iraq and Afghanistan today…
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MoD admits use of controversial ‘enhanced blast’ weapons in Afghanistan
Richard Norton-Taylor
British pilots in Afghanistan are firing an increasing number of “enhanced blast” thermobaric weapons, designed to kill everyone in buildings they strike, the Ministry of Defence has revealed. Since the start of this year more than 20 of the US-designed missiles, which have what is officially described as a “blast fragmentation warhead”, have been fired by pilots of British Apache attack helicopters. A total of 20 were also fired last year after they were bought by the MoD from the Americans last May. The missiles are a variant of the AGM-114N Hellfire missile, described by the Pentagon as “designed to produce higher sustained blast pressure in multi-room structures…
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Documenting the Palestinian holocaust
Rania Khallaf
The Palestinian Holocaust photography exhibition, held last week at the Al-Sawy Cultural Wheel in Cairo, is part of a set of activities initiated by the Palestinian Holocaust Memorial Museum Team, whose aim is to create a museum dedicated to Israeli crimes against the Palestinians. Immediately before the exhibition’s opening there was also a celebration of the first anniversary of the team’s formation, which included a screening of a documentary film setting out the aims of the proposed Palestinian Holocaust Memorial Museum (PHMM), as well as testimonies by photographers from Gaza and music by Ahmed El-Hagar.,,
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MK Zahalka: “New law, Racist and constitutes a thought crime”
Saed Bannoura – IMEMC
As the Israeli Knesset was debating the new law, which punishes any citizen who does not recognize Israel as a Jewish Democratic State, Arab member of Knesset Jamal Zahalka, described the law as racist and a thought crime. Zahalka said that any person who demands democracy and equality would be punished and imprisoned, and that this means dozens of Jewish and Arabs university lecturers, intellectuals and politicians who propose a bi-nation al state or a state for all of its citizens would be punished and imprisoned. He also said that what this law means is that the state “would have to form a police unit that targets the thoughts of the residents, the intellectuals, and imprison them for having ideas and thoughts that are not coherent with the State’s policies…
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Terrorist Pianos of Doom!
Arthur Silber
Toward the end of last month, a noteworthy incident occurred in the classical music life of Los Angeles: Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman, who is widely admired for his virtuosic performances and who famously tours with his own custom-altered Steinway, created a furor at Disney Hall on Sunday night when he stopped his recital to announce that this would be his last American appearance — in protest of the nation’s military policies overseas. In a low voice that could not be hear d throughout the auditorium, Zimerman, universally considered among the world’s finest pianists, made reference to Guantanamo Bay and U.S. military policies toward Poland. “Get your hands off my country,” he said….
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Manipulation: How Financial Markets Really Work
Stephen Lendman
Wall Street’s mantra is that markets move randomly and reflect the collective wisdom of investors. The truth is quite opposite. The government’s visible hand and insiders control markets and manipulate them up or down for profit – all of them, including stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies. It’s financial fraud or what former high-level Wall Street insider and former Assistant HUD Secretary Catherine Austin Fitts calls “pump and dump,” defined as “artifi cially inflating the price of a stock or other security through promotion, in order to sell at the inflated price,” then profit more on the downside by short-selling. “This practice is illegal under securities law, yet it is particularly common,” and in today’s volatile markets likely ongoing daily…
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