Canada must withdraw from inhumane war: Taliban spokesman
CBC
A Taliban spokesman is urging Canadians to pressure their government to pull its troops out of war-torn Afghanistan. In an interview with CBC News, Qari Yousef Ahmadi said Canadians are involved in the war only because the United States influenced them to join. “I ask the Canadian people to ask their government to stop their destructive and inhumane mission and withdraw your troops,” said Ahmadi, speaking on his cellphone from an undisclosed location in Afghanistan. “Our war will continue as long as your occupation forces are in our land.”
Ahmadi said if the public knew the truth about the Afghan war, they would be horrified. He said NATO countries are hiding the true number of casualties they’ve had since the mission began in 2001. He also argued that while NATO accuses the Taliban of killing more civilians than soldiers with their suicide bombing, the United States is killing even more civilians when it bombs villages and towns. “I invite you to contact these people in the villages; you can find out for yourself,” he said. Independent Canadian military analyst Sunil Ram said some of Ahmadi’s points are not completely off base. Ram said independent studies show that the American military has underestimated the number of U.S. soldiers killed and wounded. He also agrees that the U.S. has done widespread bombings during the mission…

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May Combat Deaths In Afghanistan Outnumber Those In Iraq
AP
…By the Pentagon’s count, 15 U.S. and two allied troops were killed in action in Iraq last month, a total of 17. In Afghanistan it was 19, including 14 Americans and five coalition troops. One month does not make a trend, but in this case the statistics are so out of whack with perceptions of the two wars that Gates could use them to drive home his point about Afghanistan. The comparison is even more remarkable if you consider that there are about three times more U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq than in Afghanistan…

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Rumsfeld Personally Approved Brutal Interrogations
Jason Leopold, The Public Record
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally authorized the use of brutal interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay despite warnings from the FBI that the methods amounted to inhumane treatment, was possibly illegal, and would not produce reliable intelligence, a Department of Justice inspector general testified Tuesday. “The FBI believed that these techniques were not getting actionable information, that they were unsophisticated and unproductive,” said Glenn Fine, the DOJ’s inspector general, in testimony Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “They raised their concerns with the Department of Defense, but the Department of Defense, from what we were told, dismissed those concerns and that no changes were made in the Department of Defense’s strategy.”..

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American-Iranian Partnership in the New Regional Order
Raghida Dergham, Al Hayat
Based on the stances of the Islamic Republic of Iran over the security agreement between the US and Iraq, one can conclude that Tehran has begun to use Iraq as a bargaining chip in strategic maneuvers to shape a regional security order that grants it regional leadership, with acknowledgement from and in partnership with the US…The Iraqi government is trying to foster American-Iranian partnership. Its wish is that Washington and Tehran reach an agreement over a regional security order that spares it having to choose between the two. Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh believes that retrieving Iraq’s full sovereignty and freeing it of Chapter Seven, which he considers a threat to world peace and security, would qualify it to become “part of a regional and international order that would be safe for all”. However, the leadership in Tehran has no intention of seeing a regional order in which it would be just another player. It wants regional leadership in the new regional security order…Iranian leadership does not only protest issues that it considers an exploitation of Iraq as a starting base for American military action against Iran in the security agreement. It protests its “bilateral” nature by principle. It considers that Iraq has no right to ratify a bilateral agreement with the US because the government in Iraq, from Tehran’s point of view, is its subordinate. It wishes to share Iraq with the United States…

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The House with Seven Walls
Palestine Monitor
In Bethlehem, the Wall coils into a semi-circle around a secluded three-storey building. The only side of the home not bordered by towering concrete is lined with crumbled debris from dismantled roadblocks. A narrow street, forcefully squeezed between the Wall and the home, curls around to the entrance of the building. The front door opens to a view of the rectangular pillars that form the threatening barrier. Colorful graffiti wallpapers the drab gray slabs that are tipped with razor wire. A row of desolate rooms serve as the foundation of the building. Two small girls, sitting amidst the emptiness, smile at us behind the glass walls. This complex is the home of Claire Anastas and her family…

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June 13, 2008: 2 US Soldiers, 20 Iraqis Killed; 14 Iraqis Wounded
Margaret Griffis, Antiwar.com
At least 20 Iraqis were killed or found dead and 14 more were wounded in the latest violence. It is the prayer day, so reports are lighter than usual. Two American deaths were reported. The DOD reported that a U.S. soldier died at an army hospital in Texas, of wounds received on March 23 in Baghdad. Also, an American soldier died yesterday during a roadside bombing in Kadamiyah…

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Written on the Body: The Reality of War
Chris Floyd
The war in Iraq is of course a political issue, both domestically and internationally, and so it is natural that much of the discussion about the war centers on its various political ramifications. But in these heated debates on policy, strategy, funding, etc., there is always a danger of losing sight of the most overwhelmingly important aspect of the conflict: its effects on actual human beings, the suffering it imposes on our fellow creatures. The reality of war is written on the bodies – and seared into the anguished psyches – of the individuals who experience it. That is what war is, that is where it actually exists – in blood, in bone, in the synapses that carry the electric fire of human consciousness. A new report from Fallujah – the Guernica of the Iraq War – brings this home most forcefully. Two of the great witnesses of this war – Dahr Jamail and his collaborator, Ali al-Fadhily – present disturbing evidence of how the use of chemical weapons against the people of Fallujah during the brutal decimation the city in 2004 continues to bear horrific fruit today: Babies born in Fallujah are showing illnesses and deformities on a scale never seen before, doctors and residents say…

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Taliban attacks Afghan prison
AlJazeera.net
Taliban fighters have attacked the main prison in Kanadahar, southern Afghanistan, blasting through its entrance and engaging in a gun battle with police. Nearly all of the estimated 1,150 prisoners, including some 400 Taliban, have escaped, Afghan officials have said. Fighters attacked the main prison in Kandahar on Friday with a car bomb and rockets, killing police and freeing prisoners, according to the officials. Hashem Ahelbarra, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Afghanistan, quoted a Taliban spokesperson as saying that two suicide bombers blew themselves up near the entrance of the gate to the prison before 30 Taliban fighters attacked and killed 16 policemen…

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Bill Presses Iraq To Recognize Israel
Nathan Guttman
To the many challenges facing the fledgling Iraqi government, Congress may soon add this: Recognize the State of Israel and establish diplomatic ties with Jerusalem, or else risk losing some of the billions in aid that Baghdad receives from the United States. A nonbinding resolution demanding Iraqi recognition of Israel was introduced June 5 in the House of Representatives and has already gained the support of more than 60 congressmen, including several leaders of the Foreign Relations Committee…

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IDF furious after settlers fabricate kidnapping
Ynet
IDF, police, Shin Bet forces launch massive search for two settlers who reported their own kidnapping. After being found, settlers change story to say a third friend was abducted. Only 90 minutes later did they confess to lying. Two settlers are suspected of having given a false report of their own kidnapping, resulting in the launching of a large-scale manhunt that included the participation of IDF, police and Shin Bet forces. The two men began by entering the village of Ein Abus near Nablus. At around 4:00 am they called in a report and alleged that they were bound and trapped inside a car…

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Iraq war could cost taxpayers $2.7 trillion
CNN
As the Iraq war continues with no clear end in sight, the cost to taxpayers may balloon to $2.7 trillion by the time the conflict comes to an end, according to Congressional testimony. In a hearing held by the Joint Economic Committee Thursday, members of Congress heard testimony about the current costs of the war and the future economic fallout from returning soldiers. At the beginning of the conflict in 2003, the Bush administration gave Congress a cost estimate of $60 billion to $100 billion for the entirety of the war. But the battle has been dragging on much longer than most in the government expected, and costs have ballooned to nearly ten times the original estimate…

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The Israeli army attacks a village near Bethlehem and kidnaps a man and his Jewish wife
Najeep Farajj – Bethlehem – IMEMC News
The Israeli army invaded the village of Hussan located near Bethlehem city in the southern part of the West Bank. During the invasion on Thursday morning the soldiers kidnapped a Palestinian man and his wife that is from Jewish origins. Mohamed Hamamerh, 25, met his wife Melissa, 23, several months ago when he used to work at the settlement of Bitar Illit, an Israeli settlement built illegally on the land of Hussan village.When the young couple decided to get married, they came to Bethlehem city were Melissa converted to Islam. They were married last month during a large wedding at Hussan village, Hamamerh’s family reported. The settlers of Bitar Illit attacked the village of Hussan, demanding that Melissa was kidnapped and forced to get married, which the family of Hamamerh denies…

The village told media sources in Bethlehem that the settlers threatened to send the Israeli army to get Melissa out using force, which was done today.

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If Silwan’s Stones Could Speak
Haitham Sabbah, Palestine Think Tank
Historically, Jerusalem began as a small village where the Palestinian village of Silwan sits today. Currently, Silwan has a population of over 45,000 Palestinians. Underneath their homes and ragged streets lie the remnants of 5000 years of glorious nations who lived there. Silwan is located in East Jerusalem, which was occupied by Israel in 1967. Since then, behind the Zionist claim of reconnecting with the ancient heritage of the Jews, the truth is, archeology has become a weapon of dispossession of Palestinians. Archaeological excavations are being carried out as part of a concerted campaign to expel them from their ancestral home and history…

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1,300 new settler homes to be built in east Jerusalem: report
AFP
An Israeli planning body gave the green light on Friday for 1,300 new homes for Jewish settlers to be built in occupied and annexed east Jerusalem, the Haaretz newspaper reported. The houses will be built in Ramat Shlomo in the northern part of the Holy City where there are already 2,000 settler homes, it said…

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Al-Sadr calls for restraint from his militia
Yahoo News
…Muqtada al-Sadr has called for restraint in an apparent bid to exert control over his Mahdi Army militia fighters. A statement read after Friday prayers in the holy city of Kufa says the Shiite militia will continue to resist U.S.-led forces in Iraq but fighting should be limited to a select group. He says “weapons will be in the hands of this group exclusively and will only be directed at the occupier”…

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The black days of 1948
Dr. Marwan Asmar, Online Journal Contributing Writer
For a long time, Israel sought to perpetuate a myth that it was not their officials who sought to expel the Palestinians out of their country but it was the Arabs who made them leave. This is how Israel justified and today justifies its existence by denying what it has done to others. The Palestinian Diaspora of 1948, in which over 750,000 people were forced to leave their homes, was made virtually at gunpoint. This year, as Israelis celebrate their 60th birthday in a bombastic fashion, Palestinians remember their Nakba of destruction and turmoil signified by their uprooting from their land. It is this monstrous equation that has to be driven at the forefront by scholars, academics, journalists, commentators, politicians, and activists so that the world is educated about the Israeli’s forced exodus of the Palestinians…

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Iraqi PM says security talks with US at impasse
SAMEER N. YACOUB, AP
Iraq’s prime minister said Friday that talks with the U.S. on a long-term security pact are at an impasse over objections that Iraq’s sovereignty is at stake, but he held out hope that negotiators could still reach a compromise. In his strongest comments yet on the debate, Nouri al-Maliki echoed concern by Iraqi lawmakers that the opening U.S. proposals would give Washington too much political and military leverage on Iraqi affairs. He left open room, however, that a deal could be hammered out….

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Israeli settlers caught on film beating elderly Palestinian woman
Saed Bannoura – IMEMC News
After an Israeli human rights group handed out small video cameras to Palestinians in the West bank, those cameras have been used to capture a number of attacks that would otherwise have gone unreported. In the latest example, an attack by a group of Israeli settlers on a Palestinian farming family Sunday was filmed, and the video released on the internet. Attacks by extremist Israeli Jewish settlers against the indigenous Palestinian population of the West Bank are common, and the incidents have increased as Israeli settlements have expanded on Palestinian land over the last 15 years. In Sunday’s attack, an elderly woman, Thamam al-Nawaja, was herding her family’s sheep when four masked and armed Israeli settlers came running toward her from the settlement of Susia.—

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BBC’s Pro-Israeli Bias
Stephen Lendman
Impartiality has no place on BBC nor does its claim about “honesty, integrity, (and being) free from political influence and commercial pressure.” How can it? Its Director-General, Executive Board Chairman, BBC Trust Chairman and senior managers are government-appointed and charged with a singular task – to function as a “propaganda system for elite interests.” On all vital issues – war and peace, state and corporate corruption, human rights, social justice, or coverage of the Middle East’s longest and most intractable conflict, Westminster and the establishment rest easy. They know BBC is “reliable” – pro-government, pro-business and dismissive of the public trust it disdains. Now more than ever. This article covers one example among many – BBC’s distorted, one-sided support for Israel and its antipathy toward Palestinians. In this respect, it’s fully in step with its American and European counterparts – Israeli interests matter; Palestinian ones don’t; as long as that holds, conflict resolution is impossible. Therein lies the problem. With its reputation, world reach, and influence, BBC’s coverage exacerbates it…

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Addressing America’s “Deeper Malignancies”
Walter C. Uhler
If you want to know what’s wrong with the foreign policy establishment in the United States, look no further than Condoleezza Rice’s article, “The New American Realism,” published in the July/August 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs.” Not only has the Council on Foreign Relations spread its pages wide open for an infamous interventionist — a lying and deceitful enabler of the Bush administration’s illegal, immoral unprovoked invasion of Iraq – it also readmitted Ms. Rice without requiring anything resembling a mea culpa for the crimes against humanity that have lowered her, the Bush administration and the United States to the depths of moral disrepute around the world. Why publish the words of a liar and alleged war criminal? Who takes her seriously?…

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Eleven killed and dozens injured in bloody day in Gaza, explosion destroys house in Beit Lahiya
Ma’an news
The number of Palestinians killed in the explosion on Thursday at a Beit Lahiya home in the northern Gaza Strip increased to seven, after three members of the Hamas-affiliated Al-Qassam Brigades died from their injuries. The announcement of the deaths of Al-Qassam fighters Muhammed Hamdan Maqdad, Muhammed Sabri Abu Naja, and Ahmad Munir Subeih in the explosion brought the death toll on Thursday in Gaza to 11, with dozens injured…

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Court Says Detainees Have Rights, Bucking Bush
Supreme Court says Guantanamo detainees have constitutional rights, rebuking Bush
MARK SHERMAN, The Associated Press
In a stinging rebuke to President Bush’s anti-terror policies, a deeply divided Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign detainees held for years at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba have the right to appeal to U.S. civilian courts to challenge their indefinite imprisonment without charges. Bush said he strongly disagreed with the decision — the third time the court has repudiated him on the detainees — and suggested he might seek yet another law to keep terror suspects locked up at the prison camp, even as his presidency winds down…

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Weekly Report: On Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory No. 24/2008 (05 – 11 June 2008)
PCHR – Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
Israeli violations of international law and humanitarian law continued in the OPT, especially in the Gaza Strip, during the reporting period (5 – 11 June 2008): Shooting: During the reporting period, IOF killed 11 Palestinians, including 2 children and an elderly man, and wounded 25 others, including 9 children and 5 women, in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. In the Gaza Strip, IOF killed 10 Palestinians, including two 8-year-old children, and wounded 16 others, including 5 children and 3 women. On 5 June, IOF killed an 8-year-old child in Khuza’a village, east of Khan Yunis, when they fired a missile that fell near her family’s house. The child’s mother was also wounded. Additionally, a Palestinian civilian was wounded by IOF during an incursion into ‘Abassan village, east of Khan Yunis…

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Two British soldiers killed in Afghanistan: ministry
AFP
Two British soldiers were killed and a third was injured after coming under enemy fire in Afghanistan on Thursday, the defence ministry in London said. Their deaths take the overall total of British troops killed in the country since the US-led invasion in 2001 to 102. The ministry said the soldiers’ families had been informed and requested a 24-hour grace period before details were released…

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* * * NOT SATIRE * * *
Bush: Iran Losing Influence in Iraq
AFP
Iran is losing influence in Iraq, U.S. President George Bush said in a French television interview broadcast Thursday a day before he arrives in Paris on the penultimate leg of a farewell European tour. “Obviously there is some… Iranian influence inside Iraq — but it’s less than it has been, and will continue to lessen, in my judgment, as its economy and as its political society begins to develop,” Bush told France 3 television…

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U.K. rights group: U.S. has photographic evidence of torture
AP
The U.S. government has photographic evidence that a Guantanamo Bay inmate was tortured with a knife after being taken to Morocco by U.S. forces, a British human rights group said Tuesday. Reprieve said their client, Binyam Mohamed, had his genitals slashed repeatedly with a doctor’s scalpel while in custody in Morocco after he was flown there from Pakistan by American officials in 2002. It also said his U.S. captors later took pictures of the abuse to show authorities that his wounds were healing. Mohamed, an Ethiopian national and former British resident, is charged by the United States with plotting with al-Qaeda to bomb American apartment buildings. Reprieve maintains the charge is based on information coerced from Mohamed using torture…

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June 12, 2008: 2 GIs, 18 Iraqis Killed; 60 Iraqis Wounded
Margaret Griffis, Antiwar.com
Baghdad was again rocked by a series of bombings today, while two U.S. servicemembers were killed. Across Iraq, at least 18 Iraqis were killed and 60 more were wounded. Two Egyptian gunmen were also killed. An American soldier was killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad this afternoon. A Marine died in a non-battle-related incident on Wednesday…

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