Resistance in Afghanistan takes it up a notch
Saul Kanowitz, Party for Socialism and Liberation
For the first time since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military and its allies suffered more combat deaths in Afghanistan than in Iraq over the course of a month…According to a CNN report, attacks by the resistance against occupation forces in Afghanistan have been on the rise over the last four years. There were 50 percent more attacks in 2007 than there were the year before—7,143 and 5,174, respectively. This year, resistance forces carried out 2,999 attacks through June 6…The imperialists, as history has shown, fail to take into account the desire of a people for self-determination when calculating military maneuvers. The U.S. assumed that overwhelming military superiority would determine the outcome of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. To their dismay, the resistance forces, which come from the occupied people, are able to strike against the occupation forces and dissolve into the population from which they are drawn…

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Broken Laws, Broken Lives: The Consequences of Torture
Review of Physicians for Human Rights’ Report
Spencer Spratley
Physicians for Human Rights, based in Washington, D.C., has just published a report entitled Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture and its Impact. It presents a very detailed and exhaustive study of the medical evidence of torture by U.S. personnel and its impact on the victimized detainees…The opening paragraph of the preface sets a powerful tone for the rest of the report: “This report tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individual’s lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors”. The report focuses on the experiences of 11 former detainees who were subjected to degrading and humiliating treatment as well as barbaric physical and sexual abuse. It is worth noting that none of these individuals were ever charged with a crime and no reparations have been made to them. Among other things, these men were subjected to a wide variety of sadistic indecencies, including: prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, forced nakedness, beatings, sodomy, electric shocks, severe stress positions, being forced to drink urine, and witnessing the desecration of the Koran…

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Silent Victims of the Iraq War
EPIC
In honoring World Refugee Day today, we should comprehend the impact that conflict has on the most innocent and vulnerable members of society. Five years after the U.S. invaded Iraq, more than 800,000 children have been forced to flee their homes to escape the violence. According to a report released Tuesday, most are unable to go to school and 60% do not have access to clean drinking water. More than half of the displaced children suffer from malnutrition. The mortality rate of children under 5 years old is three times higher in Iraq than in Syria or Jordan…

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Izzat al-Douri speaks
Nicola Nasser, Al-Ahram Weekly
Izzat Ibrahim Al-Douri, deputy of Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s late president executed by the US occupation in Iraq in 2006, has surfaced despite a $10 million bounty on his head. In a lengthy interview published last month with Abdel-Azim Manaf, editor-in-chief of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Mawqif Al-Arabi, Al-Douri laid out the strategy and tactics of the Iraqi resistance led by the former ruling Baath Party…The AP reported that, “Al-Douri is believed to play an important role in financing” the resistance, “though little is known about how directly he leads fighters on the ground”. The United States as occupying power, as well as Iran and the Iranian- allied regime Washington installed in Baghdad after occupation, have been keen to downplay the role played by Al-Douri and the Baath Party in the national resistance, instead highlighting the marginal role played by Al-Qaeda, which was brought into Iraq thanks to the United States…

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Hamas rejects a multinational Arab force in the Gaza Strip
Palestinian Information Center
Hamas has renewed its rejection of the idea of deployment of a multinational Arab forces to the Gaza Strip as a final phase of the truce with the Israeli occupation. In statement he made to Quds Press news agency, Ezzat al-Resheq, member of Hamas’s political bureau, called for talks between Hamas and Fatah to end the internal rift and to agree on the rebuilding of the PA security on professional basis rather than factional basis and for that to happen there is no need for a multinational Arab force to be sent to the Gaza Strip…

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Video: Taliban forces alter strategy
Real News
…Following a three day offensive by Afghan and NATO forces, 56 Taliban fighters were killed just outside Kandahar in the Arghandab district. Casualty figures remain unconfirmed. Although Afghan officials claimed victory Special Newsweek Correspondent Sami Yousafzai reports that small skirmishes are what Taliban forces want in order to make it difficult for NATO forces “to manage and focus.”..

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Iraq Still a Major Source of Refugees in 2007
Jim Lobe
…Iraq was the biggest source of the world’s newest refugees for the third year in a row, according to the latest annual report of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) released here Thursday. Last year’s exodus was absorbed mostly by Syria, which took in some 500,000 Iraqis during the year — or nearly half of the more than a million people who sought refuge by crossing an international border during 2007. Tens of thousands more Iraqis also found their way to Lebanon, Egypt, Yemen, Turkey, and even Sweden and Germany, which took in, respectively, 10,000 and 6,700 Iraqis during the year. The report, “World Refugee Survey 2008", said more than two million Iraqis are currently living outside their homeland, the vast majority in Syria and Jordan. Somalia — also caught up in Washington’s “global war on terror” — ranked second as a source of new refugees during the year…

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Big oil cashes in on Iraq slaughter
Bill Van Auken, WSWS
Four major US, British and French oil companies are getting their hands on the petroleum reserves of Iraq for the first time in 36 years, based on no-bid contracts, the New York Times reported Thursday. These deals reached with the US-backed regime in Baghdad have placed the five-year-old US war of aggression in the clearest possible perspective…For the over one million Iraqis killed and the millions more turned into refugees or made homeless in their own land, an overriding justification for their suffering has now been laid bare. It was to further enrich the already obscenely wealthy corporate executives and major shareholders of Big Oil…

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Suicide Attack On U.S. Convoy Kills 12 In Afghanistan
RTTNews
A suicide bomber attacked a U.S. convoy in the southern opium-grown Afghan province of Helmand Friday, killing an American soldier and more than 11 Afghan civilians, while two U.S.-led coalition troops were killed in the same province, officials said. The attack comes a day after a huge operation to drive Taliban rebels from a key stronghold of Kandahar. The attack also wounded six others…Taliban militants claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement posted on their official website, saying they targeted a U.S. convoy near the provincial Afghan intelligence department office around 10 am. Thursday, two U.S.-led coalition troops were killed in an operation against insurgent in Helmand…

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Iranians don’t believe that military strikes are coming
Anne Penketh, Independent
…But privately, Iranian officials continue to believe that the talk of military strikes is part of the West’s carrot-and-stick pressure tactics aimed at coercing Iran into halting its uranium enrichment programme. They think the US is too tied down in Iraq to risk another military adventure with uncertain consequences. While the Israelis wield the stick, the Europeans and the US are dangling a carrot of a guaranteed fuel supply for a civil nuclear programme, which is what the Iranians say they want, although they insist on a domestic fuel cycle which is still not on offer from a West that fears a possible diversion towards a nuclear bomb…

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Why is Google so afraid and What is it afraid of ?
Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues
Seems that Google is at it again regarding the indexing of Uruknet website. This time round, it’s not just Google news that stopped indexing, it’s the actual Google search engine that simply deletes the Uruknet articles from its list….If you have any ideas as to how this can be dealt with, leave them on the comment section. I also suggest we start boycotting Google. I personally will switch to the Yahoo search engine as of today. Awaiting your bright gems of creative thinking and action…

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Forced apart by law
Toni O’Loughlin reports on the fate of an Israeli-Arab man and his Palestinian wife, which reflects what some see as a wider effort to banish Palestinians from Israel
Toni O’Loughlin in Jerusalem
Morad Asonah’s honeymoon ended abruptly when he returned home to Israel with his bride, Abir, to discover they – and thousands of other Israeli-Arab and Palestinian couples like them – had been banned from living together. The government said the ban, which forced Palestinians like Abir back to the West Bank and Gaza and separated parents from children, was a temporary measure to combat suicide bombers when it introduced the law in 2003. But now the law is set to be renewed a fourth time amid growing concern among human rights groups that couples like the Asonahs will be consigned to a permanent limbo…

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Israel is Deporting Jerusalem Christians
Laity Committee in the Holy Land
Hundreds of Jerusalem Christians are loosing residency rights in their City due to policies of the Israeli Ministry of Interior. The policy that aims to reduce the number of non-Jews in the City takes its toll on families and individuals who hold residency permits at foreign countries. No matter how long they travel abroad, no matter if they were born in Jerusalem before or after Israel occupied East Jerusalem, they are considered visitors in their own city. Palestinian Christians who make today not more than 9,000 will lose 15% of their population as a result of this policy. While Jews from all over the world and even converts to Judaism are allowed to immigrate to Israel under the Israeli Law of Return, the indigenous Jerusalemites are considered temporary residents…

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Vanunu nails Iran and Democracy
Eileen Fleming
…. Vanunu wrote: They all have their own double standards. No one should ignore the fact that Atomic weapons are in Israel and that it was France most especially who helped build the Dimona reactor in 1960. No one should forget that France was the first state to start nuclear weapons proliferation in secret, not Iran. The world’s problem with Iran is the obligation to help the people of Iran to have freedom and democracy; free from a dictator regime. The problem is not nuclear weapons in Iran but the need for freedom for all the people. I am not at all supporting this Ayatollahs regime in Iran. This regime should be ended and replaced by freedom and democracy for all Iran people. The same goes for Israel too, which is only a democracy if you are a Jew. The Israeli problem is the Jewish apartheid regime. No nuclear weapons program is a true deterrent or safeguard mechanism for security because Atomic weapons can only bring destruction. Atomic weapons are a mechanism of self destruction. How can Israel, the only country in the Middle East known to have a nuclear weapons program expects all others not to even have peaceful nuclear energy programs? Since Israel has the Bombs, then they can not speak with credibility about stopping all the Middle East states from having at least Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Science and Technology. Israel by all its nuclear secret activities opened the way for any state to do the same…

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Justifying the Unjustifiable
Killing the News in Iraq
DAVE LINDORFF
Reuters may be “satisfied” with the Pentagon’s investigation concluding that US troops were “justified” in their slaying of the news organization’s working journalist Waleed Khaled back in 2005, but the rest of us shouldn’t be. Khaled and his driver were killed by US troops when they came on a firefight involving US troops and Iraqi police who were allegedly under attack. The Pentagon report into the incident concluded that the two men came onto the scene, and American forces, seeing Khaled’s videocam and tripod, thought it was a rocket launcher. They reportedly fired warning shots. When Khaled’s driver did the logical thing, backing slowly from the scene, US troops “assumed it was an insurgent tactic” and fired to “disable” the vehicle, killing the two men. First of all, let’s note that Khaled is not the only journalist to have been killed by US forces in Iraq…

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Reclaiming orientalism
Brian Whitaker
Edward Said changed the way western universities approach the study of other cultures — mostly for the better. “Orientalist” soon became a dirty word but, over time, lost much of its meaning and turned into an insult that bickering academics hurl at each other for no good reason. Then came the Bush administration to remind us what orientalism is really about. In 2002, Raphael Patai’s racist tome, The Arab Mind — published two years before orientalism and deservedly forgotten — was suddenly dusted off, reprinted, espoused by the neocons and used to “educate” US army officers before sending them to fight in Iraq. For Edward Said, the invasion of Iraq reinforced his argument: “Without a well-organised sense that these people [Iraqis] over there were not like ‘us’ and didn’t appreciate ‘our’ values — the very core of traditional orientalist dogma — there would have been no war.” …

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New Iraqi operation against militants produces scant resistance
Hannah Allam and Ali al Basri | McClatchy Newspapers
Iraqi security forces met little resistance Thursday on Day 1 of the government’s crackdown in the southern city of Amarah as they sought to disarm gunmen loyal to the militant Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al Sadr. Iraqi defense officials said there were no casualties or gun battles as military and national police units easily spread through northern Amarah, a mostly Shiite oil and agricultural city that borders Iran and for decades has served as a smuggling hub. The Iraqi military announced the arrests Thursday of 17 suspected militants, including Rafia Abdul Jabbar, the region’s acting deputy governor who is also the top city administrator in Amarah. “The city is quiet even though the operation has started, and I haven’t heard a gun-shot or the sound of a plane,” said Faiq Hanoun, 55, an Amarah resident…

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Report: Women and children refugees suffer in Iraq
Kim Gamel, Associated Press Writer
…Displaced children, meanwhile, have suffered from malnutrition and skin diseases due to a lack of clean water and sanitation, the report said. They also frequently lack access to education because they must work or beg on the streets instead of going to school. “Many families have female heads of household, bringing a unique set of challenges,” the IOM said in the report. Monitors in the provinces of Baghdad and Diyala “have observed large numbers of families with both widows and orphans, both of whom have many difficulties finding jobs, obtaining food, or receiving aid from local authorities and humanitarian organizations,” according to the Geneva-based organization. Observers in the Anbar province town of Qaim near the Syrian border also reported children begging in the streets while women collected garbage to resell for recycling, the report added…

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US military: American soldier killed in Iraq
AP
The U.S. military says an American soldier has been killed and five others wounded by roadside bombs northeast of Baghdad. A statement says the soldiers were struck Friday in three bombings on U.S patrols in the volatile Diyala province. At least 4,102 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003. That’s according to an Associated Press count….

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Summer In Gaza 2008 – ‘In’ Transport Mode
Gazatoday Team
Welcome to the first in a series of blogs from the Occupied Palestinian Territory known as the Gaza Strip, aka the world’s largest prison…Somehow, today, Gaza didn’t seem that far away. The oncoming global economic crisis draws closer everyday and today in the South West of England it became most apparent. Gas stations with no petrol! Gas $18 a gallon in UK as supplies dry….

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Basra is the world’s largest minefield
Abed Battat
There are about four mines for each of Basra’s 2.5 million people, said Brigadier Faisal Kazzar, a senior civil defense official in the city. These mines have turned this southern province into “the world’s most densely mine-populated province on earth,” he added. Kazzar said there were still 25 million unexploded mines in Iraq and more than one third of them were in Basra…

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