NUCLEAR HYPOCRISY
Malcom Lagauche
North Korea has had enough. For six years, the nation has been talking to the world in an attempt to stop its nuclear program. The Koreans promised to halt its program and other nations, including the U.S., promised food, fuel and an easing of diplomatic isolation. North Korea has done what it said it would, but now faces even more hostile actions from the West… Let’s face it, the North Koreans have nothing to lose. Iraq went along with the UN resolutions against the nation and quickly made good with their end of the bargain. How was it rewarded? A further 12 years embargo and finally its destruction. In 2003, while the world turned its eyes to the Middle East and watched a buildup to a war created by the U.S. over a mythical atomic bomb, there was one country in the neighborhood that actually had hundreds of atomic weapons; “poor beleaguered Israel,” as many writers (conservative and liberal alike) refer to the only atomic power in the Middle East…
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Emotional Rescue: Praise for Sea Victory Could Presage Carnage
Chris Floyd
…But the blogosphere reaction is just a bemusing sidelight. Far more serious are the potential ramifications of the incident, and the policies it could be used to justify. It almost certainly makes a direct American military strike on Somalia much more likely. This of course would be nothing new; as we noted here time and again (to almost no effect or resonance anywhere), the United States was directly involved in the invasion of Somalia by Ethio pia in late 2006: a murderous “regime change” operation by forces funded, armed and trained by the United States. The invasion and occupation, which ended in January 2009, killed thousands of Somalis, ruined and dispossessed hundreds of thousands of others, and plunged the already broken country even deeper into chaos, civil war and ruin. American forces bombed fleeing refugees, launched missile strikes into villages, captured refugees and “renditioned” them to Ethiopia’s notorious torture chambers, and, perhaps most chillingly, sent in death squads to “clean up” after missile attacks. The savage Ethiopian-American invasion was “justified” under the usual rubric of “fighting terrorism…
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Obama moves to block court access for detainees in Afghanistan
Tom Eley
On Friday, the Obama administration announced it would appeal a federal district court ruling that would have granted three prisoners held in Afghanistan at the Bagram Air Base the right to sue for their release in US courts. The Justice Department also made a court filing requesting that District Judge John D. Bates halt the current habeas corpus cases of the men, pending the appeal. The three men were abducted by, or at the behest of, the US in othe r parts of the world before being transported to Afghanistan, and have been held for more than six years without charges or access to any sort of judicial review. Fadi al Maqaleh and Amin al Bakri, both of Yemen, and Redha al-Najar, of Tunisia, have faced barbaric conditions during their imprisonment…
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Let’s skip Gaza: Pope’s PR blunder
Stuart Littlewood
So the Pope won’t be visiting Gaza on his trip to the Holy Land next month. The Holy Father’s spokesman has told the Israeli press that he’ll refrain from visiting Gaza regardless of attempts to persuade him otherwise. ‘Refrain’ is a telling choice of words: “the Pope will refrain from visiting Gaza….” It smacks of abstinence, as in abstaining from having sex. Setting foot in Gaza would be so sinful that it is forbidden. Gaza’s isolated and besieged Catholic community are none too happy judging by the reaction of their redoubtable priest Fr Manuel Mussallam, who feels the Holy Father’s trip is miss-timed…
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The futility of “peace talks” with Israel
Analysis by Khalid Amayreh
Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, whose term in office officially expired in January but remained at the helm of the Ramallah regime in order to spite off Hamas, reportedly has phoned Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to wish him a happy holiday. The courtesy call, as described by Abbas’s office, has been interpreted by observers in occupied Palestine as a preliminary sign of flirting between the fascist-minded Netanyahu and the beleaguered PLO leader. If true, Abbas would be embarking on yet another odyssey of self-depreciation and national betrayal, one that would further undermine the Palestinian national cause…
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Czar Obama
The president’s incredibly imperialist wielding of executive power.
Bruce Fein
President Barack Obama’s claim to czarlike powers in a perpetual global war against international terrorism has been blunted by a judicial appointee of former President George W. Bush. Last week, in the case Fadi al Maqaleh, United States District Judge John D. Bates denied that President Obama could make suspected “enemy combatants” disappear into the Bagram Theater Internment Facility at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan w ithout an opportunity for exoneration. (While President Obama has abandoned the term enemy combatant for Guantanamo Bay detainees, he has retained the label for detainees held elsewhere.)…
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The” New” Iraq for Dummies.
Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues
My cousin Bakr (typical Sunni name) calls me. – Please help us, we must really get out, it has become totally unbearable…it’s unlivable, we simply can’t continue… Everyday there is an explosion, we can’t even make it to the gates of the house. We are surrounded by Iranians and Shiite militias. Even the police cannot be trusted. I never knew the Shiites to be like that. You know X, Y and Z, they had to embrace Shiism, they had to, they had no choice. Your uncle is going crazy, he can’t believe what has happened to us. I can’t find a job, am too scared to seek one. Your other cousin is too scared to venture out, what if they kidnap him…
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Gaza Kids Art Proves Israeli War Crimes: Activist
Marwa Awad
A picture speaks louder than a thousands words, says a U.K. peace campaigner trapped in Gaza for helping its children express the horrors they experienced in the latest Israeli offensive through artistic drawings that he plans to take global as evidence of war crimes through children’s eyes. For 63-year-old peace campaigner Rod Cox, what started as a small project to collect samples of children’s drawings depicting Israeli war crimes in Gaza has ballooned into a cultural and artistic exchange project linking Palestinian school children with their British counterparts…
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Testimonies of abducted Gazan fishermen
ISM Gaza
On Monday 6th April 2009, Izhaq Zayed was with his son, Rassim, in a hassaka (small fishing boat) off the coast of Beit Lahia, northern Gaza. Izhaq was feeling unwell and asked Rassim to take him back to shore to go to hospital. Around the same time, an Israeli naval zodiac approached them and a soldier shot in the air. Rassim told the Israelis that his father was ill and needed to go to hospital, but they refused to let them go. An officer ordered a soldier to shoot at the boat and the soldier fired about 20 shots in close range..
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From a Saudi girl to USA President Obama ..please help
Iqbal Tamimi, Palestine Think Tank
One might think that the young girls in Saudi Arabia are not affected by what is happening in Gaza and other parts of Palestine, but this is not true, children in every part of the world are feeling the despair and pain of their peers. This lead 12 years old Judy Lu’ay Khashokji to write a plea to USA president Barak Obama. Expressing in her own simple and moving words her feelings of pain and sadness caused by what happened to the c hildren of Gaza. Her feelings are an example of the feelings of millions of Arab and Muslim children who witnessed that attack on Gaza leaving the children drenched in blood inside their schools and while sleeping in their beds at what used to be their families’ homes. When Israel commits its crimes against Palestinians, the damage is far beyond the Palestinian borders, and this is an important issue that should be kept in mind, an aggression on children anywhere in the world is our business because it bounces back on our children’s feelings, Palestinians or otherwise…
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A Rocky Beachhead: Instability in Georgia Puts US Geostrategic Plans at Risk
by Eric Walberg
The bloom has officially faded on Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s 2003 rose revolution. The 13 opposition parties in this nation of 4.7 million are united and determined, and began their latest series of demonstrations 9 April, when as many as 100,000 demonstrated in Tbilisi, capturing the nation’s mood of frustration and, increasingly, contempt for their oversize, fanatically pro-American president. They have vowed to pe rsist with a campaign of civil disobedience until he resigns….
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Anti-siege gov’t committee: The world to blame for mass killing of Gaza patients
Palestinian Information Center
The government committee to break the siege stated Tuesday that the international community’s inaction and passivity towards the Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip which led to the death of dozens of patients is complicity in the genocidal war waged by Israel against the Palestinian people. In a press statement received by the PIC, spokesman for the committee Adel Zu’rub said that the increasing death toll of Gaza patients, who are denied travel for medical treatment abroad as a result of the blockade, is a genocidal crime committed in cold blood by Israel before the eyes of the whole world…
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Horrors of KLA prison camps revealed
Michael Montgomery, BBC
The man spoke plainly as he explained the horrors he lived through in a Kosovo Liberation Army prison camp 10 years ago. He told me about how he watched people beaten with steel pipes, cut with knives, left for days without food, and shot and killed. “What can you feel when you see those things?” he said. “It’s something that is stuck in my mind for the rest of my life. You cannot do those things to people, not even to animals.” … Soon after the war ended in K osovo, I started looking into the thousands of civilians who disappeared during and after the conflict. Many Albanian victims were dumped in wells or transported to mass graves as far away as Belgrade. But others – mainly Serbs – simply vanished without a trace. There were no demands for ransom, no news of any kind…
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Iraq in Fragments
Dahr Jamail
…Having recently returned from Iraq, I experienced living in Baghdad where people were dying violent deaths on a daily basis. Nearly every day of the month I spent there saw a car bomb attack somewhere in the capital city. Nearly every day the so-called Green Zone was mortared. Every day there were kidnappings. On good days there were four hours of electricity on the national grid, in a country now into its seventh year of being occupied by the U.S. military, and where there are now over 20 0,000 private contractors. Upon returning home, I experienced the disconnect between that reality, lived by roughly 25 million Iraqis, and the surreal experience of living in the United States — where most media pretend the occupation of Iraq is either not happening, or uses the yardstick of decreased U.S. military personnel deaths in Iraq as a measure of success…
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The Jewish State VS Mordechai Vanunu: A Case Of Christian Persecution
By Eileen Fleming
On April 10, 2009, Billy Briggs reported from occupied east Jerusalem that Mordechai Vanunu informed him, “I was walking here this morning and a car drew slowly up alongside me. There were four men in the car wearing sunglasses. One of them shouted at me…the car followed me…the man call out again in Hebrew. ‘You are garbage,’ he said. But I kept on walking and ignoring him.” When Vanunu entered the foyer of his rundown backpacker’s hot el the men “leapt from the vehicle, flashed ID cards and ushered him into the back seat. Residents and traders, many of whom know the famous Israeli, stood and watched his public humiliation. “They took me to the local station and warned me not to go to Bethlehem this year to celebrate Christmas. They said they’d be watching me and that I should also not speak to journalists or foreigners.”…
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