[UrukNet] - [Daily Information from Occupied Iraq] - [newsletter 17 Jun 2006 _ Part Two]

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Why anti-racists should stand with Palestinians on June 18th at Boston Government Center Richard Hugus ...On June 18 in Boston, a group of Zionists will march through the streets in a blatant show of support for the colonization of Palestinian land and the eradication of the Palestinian people. Their march, billed yearly as "Boston Celebrates Israel," implies public support for their show of racism. It implies that the people of Boston support the foundation of the Israeli state--called by Palestinians the Nakba ! ("catastrophe"), the mass killing and expulsion of the indigenous Arab people--and the creation of "nationality" laws allowing Jewish people born anywhere in the world to occupy Palestinian land taken through military aggression, while depriving native born Arab Palestinians of their rights to live and build on their own land. Currently, it means support for the construction of 450 miles of prison walls surrounding Palestinian communities, an economic blockade of enforced starvation against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, aerial bombardment of Palestinian cities, assassination of Palestinian leaders, and the imprisonment of more than 9,000 Palestinians for political reasons... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24046 Which Side Are You On? Stephen Gowans When US President George W. Bush identified an "axis of evil" whose existence Washington pledged to topple through a program of regime change, Iraq was not the only country the United States threatened with a virtual declaration of war. North Korea and Iran were also singled out. According to former Bush speechwriter, David Frum, who boasts he had a major hand in coining the "axis of evil" phrase, the common characteristic that bound the trio was "resentment of US power," ano! ther way of saying they resented US efforts to encroach upon their sovereignty. The quest by Washington to dominate other countries is ultimately rooted in economic forces, and seeks advantage for the country’s corporations, banks and wealthy families... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24033 Detainee report slammed as `whitewash' AP Murky procedures, lack of oversight and inadequate resources led to mistakes in the way US troops treated Iraqi and Afghan detainees. But two Pentagon reports, released publicly for the first time, found no widespread mistreatment or illegal actions by the military. A human rights organization called the reports released on Friday a whitewash that ignored countless documented accounts of detainee abuse. One report detailed several incidents involving US special operations! forces in 2003-04. It said interrogators fed some Iraqi detainees only bread and water for up to 17 days, used unapproved interrogation practices such as sleep deprivation and loud music and stripped at least one prisoner. That report concluded the detainees' treatment was wrong but not illegal and reflected inadequate resources and lack of oversight and proper guidance rather than deliberate abuse. No military personnel were punished as a result of the investigation... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24048 Smearing Anti-War Activists? NY Times Op-Ed Laments Anti-War Funeral Protests FAIR A June 12 op-ed in the New York Times made a bold accusation: anti-war activists have targeted funerals of Iraq War soldiers with noisy protests. But evidence to back up that charge is nonexistent (...) Many of the posts on Zacharias' website suggested that the funeral protests she was describing were more likely those organized by Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church, a virulently homophobic group that celebrates U.S. m! ilitary deaths as punishment for the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy towards homosexuals. The Phelps group is by no reasonable definition anti-war. In a response to one reader, Zacharias acknowledged that further research revealed that the widows she spoke with were all referring to Phelps' group... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24047 Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Saturday, 17 June 2006 Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, n a dispatch posted at 3:27pm Makkah time Saturday afternoon, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that at dawn on Saturday US occupation forces closed the highway to the border crossing between Iraq and Syria in western Iraq. The al-Qa’im correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported local eyewitnesses as saying that US forces suddenly closed the road that crosses the border 30km west of al-Qa’im in the face of peo! ple still leaving and entering Iraq. The witnesses said that swarms of US helicopters were prowling the skies at low altitude over the border strip that divides the two states, while US forces warned the people of the nearby towns such as al-'Ubaydi and Makr adh-Dhib and the surrounding areas that they would arrest anyone using Syrian cellular phones because the Iraqi Resistance – they claimed – uses them. Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24049 Big Bad “al-Qaeda” and Zyklon B Kurt Nimmo If we are to believe Ron Suskind, billed as a "Bush antagonist," al-CIA-duh terrorists "came within 45 days of attacking the New York subway system with a lethal gas similar to that used in Nazi death camps. They were stopped not by any intelligence breakthrough, but by an order from Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman Zawahiri. And the U.S. learned of the plot from a CIA mole inside al-Qaeda. These are some of the more startling revelations by Pulitzer Prize-winning author ! Ron Suskind," according to Time Magazine. Ah, yes, "al-Qaeda" operatives, acting like Nazi butchers, making sure to use Zyklon B on innocent commuters... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24050 Savage demanding reprisals against Iraqi civilians Inland, Daily Kos ...The call for murder comes up in the context of the Haditha massacre, where Savage's twisted mental wires gets things confused. Sometimes he asserts that the marines are innocent and being accused by vile Iraqis and insane liberals. But then he goes into an explanation of why killing a large number of civilians after an attack on American troops is not only okay, but a strategy for victory, just as it was after World War II. Typical of the c! onservatives of this country, Savage has one statement for people with a conscience, and another for his fans: our guys would never do that, and our guys were justified in doing that (...) Before anyone gives me shit for spending time on Savage, he illustrates why the con strategy is schizophrenic. One one hand, it's all for them, the Iraqis, to protect them, give them freedom, here's another billion. On the other, it's looking to kill some muslims. The same war and occupation that is all for the good of the Iraqis won't even count how many have been and are being killed by US troops... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24044 Bush In Baghdad Walter A. Davis + Bob Boldt As Marx taught, history repeats itself as farce. Except when it was farce the first time: Bush in military garb, tight at the crotch, striding the decks of the Lincoln under the banner "Mission Accomplished." Then it can only repeat itself as a smug, tight-lipped instruction to the Media (and sadly even NPR chimed in) that they better play what is no more than a Photo Op as if it were the Second Coming. But not, perhaps, of Jesus. Something else descended from the ! clouds on Baghdad. A picture we are told is worth a thousand words. Or a challenge to words, perhaps, to honor the right side of the brain (the side that thinks poetically in images) by finding a way to offer the left what is known only when stripping away ideological mystifications has become the very way in which one receives "the news of the day."... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24041 *** CounterPunch Special Report*** Its Origins and Growth The Power of the Israel Lobby KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON, Former CIA analysts ...The tragedy of the present situation is that it has become impossible to separate Israeli from alleged U.S. interests ­ that is, not what should be real U.S. national interests, but the selfish and self-defined "national interests" of the political-corporate-military complex that dominates the Bush administration, Congress, and both major political parties. Th! e specific groups that now dominate the U.S. government are the globalized arms, energy, and financial industries, and the entire military establishments, of the U.S. and of Israel ­ groups that have quite literally hijacked the government and stripped it of most vestiges of democracy... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24043 Torturers love loopholes Swopa, Needlenose The Washington Post has a pair of articles today on the bureaucracy of abominations. First, on page A16, a reverberation from our country's dip in the moral abyss: A secretive military Special Operations group in Iraq used several unauthorized interrogation tactics on detainees in early 2004 after it erroneously received an outdated policy from commanders in Baghdad, according to a high-level military investigative report released yesterday at the Pentagon. . . . Army! Brig. Gen. Richard P. Formica found that members of the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Arabian Peninsula used official guidance that had been developed in September 2003 to create its own set of rules for interrogations, unknowingly including the forbidden tactics (...) . . . But Formica concluded that the soldiers using the tactics were not responsible for violating policy or the law from February to May 2004 because they believed what they were doing had been approved. . . . Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24040 Zarqawi successor is a US creation Roads to Iraq As I said before, Zarqawi was a myth created by the Americans, the greatest mystery about Zarqawi was the fact that the bulk of his victims were Iraqis, not Americans, strange coincidence that his agenda to divide Iraq has been similar to that of the invaders. As Iraqi writer, Haifa Zangana said: Even if Zarqawi did not exist they, [the US occupation] would create one, and if he died, they would make another Zarqawi to keep Iraq under their control. The "fin! e-tuned" new Zarqawi is created. We heard about US military identified Zarqawi successor, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, as they called him, they even published his autobiography. One problem here and it is: Nobody in Egypt among terrorists experts, Egyptian security, not even fanatic Muslims knows such a man or such a name... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24039 A grim milestone in the Iraq war: 2,500th US military death WSWS Editorial Board ...Every leading institution of the American establishment—political parties, the media, academia—is implicated in the crimes being committed in Iraq. The indifference and contempt within ruling circles for the both the lives of the men and women sent to fight the war and the growing opposition to the war at home was expressed in the lack of any significant coverage of the 2,500th US military death in Iraq. It received scant coverage! in the newspapers. After a brief mention on Thursday’s evening news programs, it was largely forgotten by Friday... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24036 WALL STREET JOURNAL GIVES HUGO CHAVEZ A MIXED REVIEW Stephen Lendman In contrast to its one-sided stance on Hugo Chavez, the June 16 Wall Street Journal had an interesting article on US based activists in Boston, New York, San Diego, Miami, Cincinnati and other cities around the country forming Bolivarian Circles and other groups supporting the Chavez government. But it couldn't do it without taking its usual swipe at the Venezuelan leader beginning with the front page article's title: Move Over Che: Chavez Is Ne! w Icon of Radical Chic. That's WSJ language intending to demean in its headline rather than use a proper one to reflect what their story was about... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24035 2,500 dead: How many more? Cindy Sheehan On Feb. 1, I was arrested at the State of the Union address for wearing a Veterans for Peace shirt that read: "2,245 Dead. How many more?" A little more than four months later, we are now tragically marking the deaths of 255 more of our brave and wonderful young American soldiers. So today, with 2,500 dead, I ask again: How many more? And with tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians -- maybe even a lot more than 100,000 -- killed, I ask: How many more? All of their families, ! American and Iraqi, will never be the same again due to the trickery and deceit of the commander in chief of the U.S. military and his advisers and cabinet members. And for what? So Halliburton can get reconstruction contracts and Exxon Mobil can lay its pipelines and charge $3.50 for a gallon of gas?... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24034 Iraq mother condemns army 'blood money' Lorna Martin, The Observer The mother of a soldier killed in the Iraq war has condemned the army's decision to offer a lucrative bounty to troops who persuade their friends to join the forces. Rose Gentle, whose 19-year-old son Gordon was killed in Basra a month after completing his training, called it 'blood money'. The army is offering members of infantry and artillery regiments £1,300 per recruit in an attempt to reverse a recruitment shortfall that has left the forces 2! 000 soldiers below strength... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24032 Video The horrors of the Fallujah siege Imad Khadduri Independent filmmaker Mark Manning was the only Westerner to travel to Fallujah un-embedded, and he lived with the refugees of Fallujah and experienced life from their point of view, returning with them to their destroyed city after the siege by the United States. Unknown to any authorities, he recorded what he saw. He went through the checkpoints, witnessed the devastation of thousands of homes, shops and mosques, and documented the horrors of the s! iege as recounted by those who survived inside the city during the battles. The people of Fallujah asked him to tell their story to the world, and he is now fulfilling that request with the release of Caught in the Crossfire... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24031 Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Friday, 16 June 2006 Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, ...In a dispatch posted at 1:15pm Makkah time Friday afternoon, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that Iraqi Resistance forces battered British troops in their base near al-'Amarah in southeastern Iraq during Thursday-Friday night, forcing them to take refuge in pens for goats and water buffaloes over night. The al-'Amarah correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported that the Resistance fired five Katyusha rockets! at the main British base located 5km from the city at 2am Friday morning. The barrages set fires burning in the northern part of the base, which was shaken a short while later by six explosions that were so powerful that they were felt in nearby villages as well... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24030 Zarqawi the scourge defeated, Osama not wanted for 9/11? Jerry Mazza, Online Journal Associate Editor As everyone and his brother, including Jordanian intelligence, rushes in to claim a piece of the Zarqawi kill, his fellow-Afghanistan-Mujihadeen and super-star terror-meister, Osama bin Laden, fade into Not Wanted by FBI for 9/11 status, that is, the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, according to an article by Enver Masud. What? What’s going on here? I thought that’s why Bush declared The War on Ter! ror in the first place and went to Afghanistan to "smoke him out." But hey, what do I know, what do we know? We only live here... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=24029 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.