[UrukNet] - [Daily Information from Occupied Iraq] - [newsletter 21 Aug 2006 - part two]

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Restarting the 34 Day War Mike Whitney Israel is in a state of post-war trauma. Its 34 day pounding of Lebanon achieved none of the stated goals and has left the public furious at the incompetence of the Olmert government. 118 soldiers were killed in the conflict and Israel’s celebrated "power of deterrents" has been smashed to smithereens. Nothing was gained. In the north, industry was brought to a complete standstill while the local people were shunted off to fallout shelters for weeks on end. What for? Hezbol! lah hasn’t been "disarmed" and the 2 captured Israeli soldiers haven’t been returned. The whole travesty was a dead loss. The war ended as abruptly as it started. It was suddenly called off when Olmert couldn't bear the rising death-toll, a fact that was not lost on Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Nasrallah said from the very beginning that the only way to beat Israel was by "killing soldiers and destroying weapons". Olmert’s retreat just proves that that Nasrallah was right.... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25993 Terror Against Nature American-Palestinian New Generation Emboldened by its uncriticised destruction of Gaza's electricity power plant in the first days of the assualt on Gaza, Israel almost immediately attacked Lebanese infrastructure including the airport, bridges, roads, powerplants, and unbelievably, oceanside power station oil storage tanks in Jiyeh, about 19 miles south of Beirut on July 13-15, 2006. The intentional targeting of oil storage tanks and the implicit understanding of the devastation that the re! leased heavy fuel oil would inflict on the Mediterranean coast is entirely consistent with brazen statements by the Israeli throughout the war, boasting that they would set Lebanon back to pre-electricity days... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25981 "I Was a Propaganda Intern in Iraq" - Fmr. Lincoln Group Intern Describes Paying Iraqi Press to Plant Pro-American Articles Secretly Written by U.S. Military Democracy Now! ...Well, I arrived in Baghdad airport and was taken to a villa in the Green Zone via Camp Victory. After about a week of twiddling my thumbs and not really doing a lot, I became rather impatient and emailed people back in D.C., saying, you know, "What am I doing here? I thought I was going to be doing some work." And within a day or two, I was! taken to lunch by another employee, and he explained to me in detail what exactly it was the Lincoln Group was doing. And I was going to take over his position, because he was going on holiday, so -- on vacation, I should say. And what he was doing was receiving English-written articles by soldiers in a certain unit inside Camp Victory, the major U.S. base just south of Baghdad. He was choosing which of those articles would be published in Iraqi newspapers. He was sending them to Iraqi employees, getting them translated into Arabic, getting them okayed by the command back at Camp Victory and then having other Iraqi employees run them down to Iraqi newspapers, where they would pay editors, sub-editors, commissioning editors to run them as news stories in the Iraqi newspapers. And that was the role, you know, after about a week or ten days of me being there, that I took over... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25988 GI Special 4H21B: Prisoner Needs Your Action Now - August 21, 2006 Thomas F. Barton Stanley Howard, Organizer Of Prisoners Against The War, Needs Your Help NOW During the fall of 2005, acting inside Statesville Prison in Joliet, Illinois, Stanley Howard brought together a group of inmates to found Prisoners Against The War, the first such organization in U.S. history. [The original announcement is reproduced inside.] This is an appeal to bring pressure to get him out of prison. In September his case goes before the governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, who has the power to order his release. The deadline for getting in the petition and letters is on Sept. 21. Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25990 Hezbollah Singes Samson's Locks K Gajendra Singh Writing in 'Foreign Policy In Focus' , Prof Stephen Zunes said " The Bush administration and an overwhelming bipartisan majority of Congress have gone on record defending Israel's assault on Lebanon's civilian infrastructure as a means of attacking Hezbollah "terrorists." Unlike the major Palestinian Islamist groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah forces haven't killed any Israeli civilians for more than a decade. Indeed, a 2002 Congressional Research Service r! eport noted, in its analysis of Hezbollah, that "no major terrorist attacks have been attributed to it since 1994." The most recent State Department report on international terrorism also fails to note any acts of terrorism by Hezbollah since that time except for unsubstantiated claims that a Hezbollah member was a participant in a June 1996 attack on the U.S. Air Force dormitory at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25987 Bush: 'We're not leaving so long as I'm president' RAW STORY US President George W. Bush has announced that the United States will not be leaving Iraq during his presidency, RAW STORY has learned. "Either you say, 'Yes it’s important we stay there and get it done,' or we leave," Bush argued. "We’re not leaving so long as I’m the president. That would be a huge mistake." At a news conference today, Bush also conceded that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25984 Ralph Peters: Ethnic Cleansing as Benefaction Kurt Nimmo According to Ralph Peters, writing for the Armed Forces Journal, there is a "dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history: Ethnic cleansing works," never mind this technique, offered by Peters as a panacea for ethnic division in the Middle East, falls under the definitions for genocide or crimes against humanity. "While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone—from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly ! religious extremism—the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region’s comprehensive failure isn’t Islam but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats." In order to address this "scandalous inequality" and realize "a more peaceful Middle East," Peters proposes "borders re-imagined," that is to say the forced migration of millions of people... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25983 The war that keeps on killing Eli Stephens, Left I on the News Israel has broken the ceasefire once again, killing four Lebanese children and wounding 21 in the last few days. What, you haven't read about it? That's because these deaths were caused by weapons fired before the ceasefire went into effect: cluster bombs. According to the U.N., these weapons, not illegal per se but illegal when fired into urban areas as they were, were fired largely in the last few days of the war, as (and these are my words, not the! U.N.'s) Israel lashed out in vengeance to kill as many Lebanese as possible before it was forced to stop its deadly assault, at least temporarily... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25982 Fade to Black: Another Terror Plot Unravels Chris Floyd Pakistanis find no evidence against 'terror mastermind’ From the Daily Mail: Rashid Rauf, whose detention in Pakistan was the trigger for the arrest of 23 suspects in Britain, has been accused of taking orders from Al Qaeda’s 'No3’ in Afghanistan and sending money back to the UK to allow the alleged bombers to buy plane tickets. But after two weeks of interrogation, an inch-by-inch search of his house and analysis of his home computer, offic! ials are now saying that his extradition is 'a way down the track’ if it happens at all. It comes amid wider suspicions that the plot may not have been as serious, or as far advanced, as the authorities initially claimed. Analysts suspect Pakistani authorities exaggerated Rauf’s role to appear 'tough on terrorism’ and impress Britain and America. A spokesman for Pakistan’s Interior Ministry last night admitted that 'extradition at this time is not under consideration’. Wow, who would have thought it? You mean there might be less than meets the eye about the Great London Bomb Plot, when George W. Bush singlehandedly foiled the imminent death of thousands of people by using his super-president powers of warrantless wiretapping?... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25979 www.uruknet.info: a site gathering daily information concerning occupied Iraq: news, analysis, documents and texts of iraqi resistance available in Italian and English.