Fw: [UrukNet] - [Daily Information from Occupied Iraq] - [newsletter 14 Jul 2006]

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-------Original Message------- From: UrukNet Date: 07/15/06 01:41:14 To: bill giltner Subject: [UrukNet] - [Daily Information from Occupied Iraq] - [newsletter 14 Jul 2006] uruknet.info ???????.???? :: information from occupied iraq :: informazione dall'iraq occupato When Torture Isn't Good Enough Booman Tribune Some of you may recall reports from Iraq which described the egregious tactic of US troops kidnapping the family members of detainees in order to "assist" the interrogation process. At the time we were informed this was a only a limited effort, and that all such family members detained were people who were known to be guilty of aiding the insurgents. As we know all too well by now, such "official" remarks are often a flat out lie to cover up systematic abuses. Salon's! David Benjamin has a story up that reveals the use of kidnapping family members of detainees in Iraq by US forces is the standard operating procedure for many interrogations (...) Yes, there's nothing like the threat of having your daughter or wife raped by American soldiers to loosen one's tongue. Why, I'd say anything they wanted me to say, I'd sign any confession put before me, if my wife or daughter was in the hands of foreign troops who had occupied my country (...) And what works with daughters and wives can work equally as well with sons: In a hearing before Shays' Government Reform subcommittee last February, Provance testified that the Army had retaliated against him. Provance also made the disturbing allegation that interrogators broke an Iraqi general, Hamid Zabar, by imprisoning and abusing his frail 16-year-old son. Waxman was shocked. "Do you think this practice was repeated with other children?" he asked Provance. "I don't see why it would not have been,! sir," Provance replied. Zabar's son had been apprehended with! his fat her and held at Abu Ghraib, though the boy hadn't done anything wrong.".... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24623 Israeli Terrorist Forces Use New Unconventional Weapons Killing Body Cells, Exposing Bones, Causing Amputations Al-Jazeerah.info Director of Public Relations at Gaza City’s Al Shifa Hospital, Dr. Juma Al Saqqa, confirmed the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s report from earlier this week which stated that Israeli forces are using toxic weapons in the Gaza Strip. The doctor spoke on Thursday, giving the death count at 85 Palestinians in the Strip since the latest Israeli attack began. Among the dead are 34 childre! n under the age of 13. And as of Thursday afternoon, 300 Palestinians are injured. Dr. Al Saqqa told Voice of Palestine Radio that the Israeli army is using new types of unconventional weapons against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during the recent attacks. He said, "They are targeting the Palestinian body with unconventional weapons and with that comes a phenomena we have not seen before in any Israeli bombardment we have lived through for many years."... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24635 Israel Can Do No Wrong. Lenin's Tomb ...No matter what Israel does, its apologists are either silently cheerful or loudly bombastic in its defense. Israel can do whatever the hell it likes, can starve people, terrorise them shoot at civilians, bomb them repeatedly, destroy infrastructure, kidnap and torture children, steal land and property, pass racist laws, promote anti-Arab racism in their classrooms, engage in ethnic cleansing, kidnap Palestine's government, treat its Arab citizens with contempt - nary a fuck! ing word... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24621 Author of Iran insignia lie invited to White House as 'expert' Sherwood Ross, Middle East Times Canada's National Post has apologized for running a fabricated story that Iran passed a new law requiring Jews to wear a yellow insignia. Oddly enough, or maybe not so odd at that, the author of this deceit, Iranian exile journalist Amir Taheri, was invited to the White House on May 30 as one of a group of "Iraq experts" to consult with US President George W. Bush. We learn of the peculiar background of those Bush call! s upon for counsel from Larry Cohler-Esses, whose article on Taheri appeared in the July 3rd issue of The Nation, a liberal American weekly. Taheri concocted the story for Benador Associates, an American PR firm operating out of D.C. that suckered National Post into running it... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24638 Armed Honour: How to Stop Rape in Iraq Richard Marsden, The Business of Emotions ...The USA thinks it is entitled to invade and plunder an innocent country, rape and murder its people, and get away with it. The rape of Abeer, the rape of Iraq. The part contains the whole. An American soldier imposes his will on an Iraqi girl. The American military imposes its will on Iraq society. Both acts are motivated by the same wretched morality which bestows the same feeling of entitlement. Steven Green is no "bad apple". H! e's typical fruit of a bad society, one morally indifferent to what is being done in its name in Iraq. Nor should he be made a scapegoat. War brutalises both sides to a conflict, albeit in different ways. Every man knows that he is capable of rape—in certain circumstances. When armed young men know they can both die tomorrow and act with impunity they are liable to rape. This excuses them not at all. It extends responsibility to those who placed them in that hellish situation in Iraq. If the five soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division are guilty of this crime, so too is the entire chain of command, all the way up to Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice and Bush... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24620 US, Israel push world to brink of world war Larry Chin, Online Journal Associate Editor In unleashing an all-out Middle East war with the bombing and blockade of Lebanon, and mounting escalations involving all surrounding countries in the region (Iran, Syria), Israel has committed an act of naked aggression and open fascism that easily rivals the worst acts of Hitler’s Third Reich. In the space of mere hours, the world has been collectively incited, provoked, and dragged into an all-out war that is on course towa! rds potential nuclear super power conflict (...) The entire world knows that only the US can stop it. The Bush administration won’t. It has only not even bothered to script words that sound like diplomacy, it has purposely congratulated Israel, which has spectacularly executed the shared 9/11-created policy of presumptive unilateral war against "terrorists" (all political opponents are "terrorists")... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24640 BBC Quiz on Israel and killing civilians Gabriele Zamparini Dear BBC’s Ladies and Gentlemen, How many Israeli civilians have been killed in Israel AND how many Palestinian and Lebanese civilians have been killed in Gaza and in Lebanon by the Israeli Government since June 9th when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing 8 Palestinian civilians and injuring 32? Why doesn’t the BBC answer this simple question in its journalistic work? Possible options: 1) all journalists at BBC can’t count (?) 2) all journalis! ts at BBC are on holiday (?) 3) all journalists at BBC are afraid to be kidnapped-captured-arrested (you decide) by Israeli troops (?) 4) the BBC is afraid to be bombed by the Israeli air force pilots flying US fighter planes (?)... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24634 Corporate Media Faithfully Spins Lebanese Mass Murder Kurt Nimmo If you watch CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, etc., ad nauseam, and you are a retard when it comes to real history (in this sense, most Americans are retards), you will believe the disgusting lie that poor little "democratic" Israel is simply responding to Arab terrorism when it kills 60 or more civilians in Lebanon, targets civilian infrastructure, bombs roads and bridges, thus trapping frightened residents in towns where they can expect to share the fate of ! the Palestinians, who are under siege for the sin of demanding Israel stop treating them as "drugged cockroaches" and "beasts on two legs," as Israeli leaders have called them. If you watch the corporate media and have allowed your higher mental facilities to be swamped by incessant pro-Israel propaganda, chances are you believe poor little Israel has "entered" Lebanon as a last ditch effort to stop Arab terrorism. In fact, Israel has messed with Lebanon for decades... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24615 What's Rove Got to Do With It? Robert Parry Right-wing columnist Robert D. Novak’s confirmation that White House political adviser Karl Rove was one of his sources for identifying Valerie Plame as a CIA officer leaves unresolved two other troubling questions – who passed this sensitive information to Rove and why was Rove cut in on such a discrete intelligence secret. A key national security principle for dealing with narrow life-or-death secrets, such as the identity of an undercover CIA officer, is compartmenta! lization. It’s not just whether officials have the appropriate level of security clearance; they also must have a "need to know."... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24633 After Supreme Court ruling against military commissions White House, Congress seek to legalize kangaroo courts, torture Patrick Martin, WSWS White House officials and congressional leaders have begun intensive discussions on how to evade the Supreme Court’s June 29 ruling in the Hamdan case, which struck down the Bush administration’s military commissions for prisoners at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp and said that the prisoners were entitled to humane treatment under Article Three of the Geneva Con! ventions. At Senate and House committee hearings this week, Justice Department and Pentagon officials urged Congress to pass legislation that simply ratifies the military tribunals as they were established under an executive order issued by Bush four years ago. At the same time, leading senators held talks at the White House on the procedures to be employed at the tribunals, which would include hearing evidence obtained from "coercive interrogation," a euphemism for torture... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24632 Middle East: Cradle Or Graveyard Of The Empire? Ardeshir Mehrdad, Countercurrents.org ...One can understand US-Iran relations with such a definition of the current place and role of diplomacy. On the one hand the United States has placed Iran at the heart of the 'axis of evil' and openly declared war against it. On the other hand, when the US deemed it useful for its long term ends, the administration has made contact with rulers of the Islamic Republic regime, notably before military attacks against Afghanistan ! and Iraq, engaging them in such plans. The aim behind such contacts was principally to seek the support of Iran's Islamic regime to defeat resistance in these countries and to help the establishment of an order favorable to the United States. Whenever the Islamic regime has responded positively to such approaches (usually in secret and through intermediaries) and done whatever was asked of it -- interceding or spying - the ultimate response has been more or less the same: the Iranian regime is aggressive and unmemorable and remains a threat to international security. As long as such a regime exists, it is a danger and a threat, even if they do everything they are told, there will be no "amnesty"... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24631 Serpent's Egg Chris Floyd ...The tacit acceptance of neo-Nazis in the military is part of a broader pattern at work in the Bush imperium: the "mainstreaming" of right-wing extremism in U.S. society, an alarming development well documented by journalist Dave Neiwert on his Orcinus blog. White-power advocates once stuck on the lunatic fringe now appear on network television as respected spokesmen on the "immigration question." High-profile Bush-backers in the mainstream media -- Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Rush L! imbaugh and other gasbags -- routinely tout "fantasies" of ethnic cleansing, concentration camps and death for "traitors," i.e., anyone who opposes the hard-right line. Bush himself has openly embraced religious extremists like the "Dominionists," whose rabid doctrines of Christian nationalism are scarcely distinguishable from the religious perversions that undergird most neo-Nazi philosophies... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24630 Israel Lebanon Crisis - The Lesson Of Hizbollah Alberto Cruz, Rebelión Europe is used to being surprised when certain crises blow up that are not within the range of the "politically correct". If Israel repeatedly breaks international law by, among other things, collective punishment of the population of Gaza (we can cite here Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that establishes that "the occupying power cannot use collective punishments against the civilian population") in that case we limit ourselves to ! calls for calm, prudence and similar nonsense. Does anyone remember the decision of the International Court of Justice in the Hague against Israel's apartheid wall? Has a single government demanded Israel remove it, as the judgement demanded? No. However, if Palestinian combatants capture one Israeli soldier during a military operation there is a general weeping and ganshing of teeth demanding his uncondtional liberation, although for years thousands of Palestinians and other Arab citizens have been languishing in jail without the high-minded Europeans lifting a finger to help them... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24629 DAILY WAR NEWS FOR FRIDAY, July 14, 2006 Today in Iraq Gunmen ambushed an Iraqi army checkpoint in northern Iraq, killing 12 soldiers and wounding one, in one of the deadliest single attacks in months against the U.S.-trained Iraqi forces (...) A bomb planted in the street killed at least seven people and wounded five as they left a Sunni mosque in northern Baghdad after Friday prayers. Further details of the incident at the Ismail al-Qubaisi mosque were not immediately available. Gunmen killed a taxi driver in a! drive-by shooting in the Dora neighborhood of southern Baghdad... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24627 When a war is not a war (unless the media says it is) William Bowles, I'n'I ...So back to the war that’s not a war. The most obvious thing about media coverage is the fact that without exception the MSM has accepted the version put about by the Israeli government, that its barbarous assault on Lebanon was in 'retaliation’ for a Hizbollah attack on Israel. But does anyone really believe this? Well yes, the MSM does and it has done a very good propaganda job on behalf of the Zionist goverrnment in pushing this lie.! Only one story made a reference to a report that the Israeli soldiers were captured by Hizbollah forces on the Lebanese side of the border. So what is going on here? Not only has the massive military assault on Gaza not had the (alleged) desired result of getting the return on the soldier captured during the military raid on the Israeli post, it has hardened the Palestinian resistance. I contend that the attack on Lebanon is an attempt to divert attention away from the slaughter going on in the Occupied Territories where now it seems the Occupation Army is murdering entire families. So great is the slaughter that even the pro-Israeli Western media has been finding it difficult to ignore. There are also credible reports of Israeli use of chemical weapons against the civilian population, also not reported in the Western media.... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24626 Letter to Kuwait's ambassador Friendship Across Frontiers - Albasrah.net Iraq, since March 2003, has experienced unprecedented sectarian and ethnic division verging on civil strife. Indeed such drastic conditions, if allowed to continue, will undoubtedly spill over to the whole region. In this context I request Your Excellency to investigate the report claiming that Shaik Mohammad Al Ali Aljabir Al Sabah stated on tape and video "95% of ethnic terrorist attacks conducted are financed by Kuwait in the interest of! the eventual division of Iraq into three regions, and ultimately downgrade a future threat to Kuwait." Undoubtedly such activities cannot be carried out successfully without the local support. Regrettably at present Iraq is not short of rogue support, namely the Badir Brigade, Mahdi Army, Kurdish Militia and foreign mercenaries, all unified in a common cause of fuelling destabilisation, lawlessness and eventual fragmentation... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24625 Iraq After Halliburton Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatch The Pentagon has taken an important first step by canceling the contract for Halliburton 's military logistics contract in Iraq and putting it up for open bid. Halliburton has only itself to blame for shoddy managment, over-charging and thumbing its nose at military investigators. In our three alternative annual reports on Halliburton , CorpWatch has uncovered innumerable cases of incompetence and corruption: for example torching brand-new $85,000 Mer! cedes trucks and charging $100 for a bag of laundry. U.S. taxpayers have paid Halliburton some $20 billion for such work supporting the administration's "war on terrorism" over the last five years. At the end of the day, they have been cheated out of hundreds of millions of dollars in unsupported costs and overcharges that the military auditors have disputed, but that the Pentagon has paid anyway. If the administration's sudden change of heart is really about fiscal responsibility, it should demand that money back. Today Halliburton has completed the major tasks for which it was hired, primarily building of five major military bases in Iraq... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24622 Iraqis! Soon you will witness amazing blows which will pound the forts and the spiders' holes of all these traitors! By Abir's godfather, Al-Moharer.net ...Many Islamic and religious leaders have issued statements warning about this new US filthy last card played by the Occupation and its stooges i.e. the sectarian civil strife.. Be aware! Be aware to fall into this dark trap which threatens our Iraq and everything we have. Furthermore the stooges and their masters care damn about the killing and the mass murder ! of inncents Iraqis..and even if Iraq is wiped out. Rather this will enrich even more the US looters, murderers and their mercenaries. Through our awareness, and our unity we shall wreck all the enemies plans. Forget not! Maliki's government is in a very, very bad way indeed. This government is impotent and is corrupt!... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24619 US may have kidnapped families of Iraqi detainees Raw Story American forces in Iraq have been accused of kidnapping the families of detainees as an interrogation tactic, RAW STORY has learned. A story in today's edition of Salon suggests that the kidnapping method may have been used systematically in the course of intelligence gathering through interrogations in the Iraq war. Salon added that Members of Congress including Rep. Christopher Shays, a Republican of Connecticut, have issued a subpoena to Secretary of ! Defense Donald Rumsfeld to hand over documents on the matter. They are due at 5 PM today... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24618 Syria on edge Truth About Iraqis Not looking good here. Much talk of imminent attack on Syria itself, possibly Damascus. Already hear reports of attacks on roads leading to the main Lebanon-Syria highway. Refugees from Iraq and now refuges from Lebanon, thousands of Lebanese, Arabs and other tourists trying to escape fighting in southern Lebanon and southern suburbs of Beirut. A bombing of Syrian installations is in the offing, likely within the next 24-72 hours IF things do not change on the ground... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24617 Media coverage on the assault on Lebanon Eli Stephens, Left I on the News Continuing my theme from yesterday, Eric Boehlert at Huffington Post (yes, believe it or not, there finally is one post there on the subject) quantifies CNN's coverage of the deaths that occured yesterday. He found twelve references to the lone Israeli civilian casualty to a single mention of the 52 Lebanese civilian casualties. For my part, let me note this. Typified by this AP story, press coverage that I have seen universally mentions th! e "50 Katyusha rockets" (sometimes listed as 75 or 100) that Hizballah has fired at Israel, but not one has quantified the number of Israeli strikes. Of course they mention the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon, but any idea that those strikes have been manyfold greater in number, not to mention probably an order of magnitude or two greater in tonnage, is completely absent... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24616 www.uruknet.info: a site gathering daily information concerning occupied Iraq: news, analysis, documents and texts of iraqi resistance available in Italian and English. You receive this newsletter because you subscribed it. If you think it was an abuse, or simply if you don't want to receive it any more, click here to unsubscribe from the newsletter.