THE UGLY AMERICAN WHO REMAINS IGNORANT

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem

In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

THE UGLY AMERICAN WHO REMAINS IGNORANT

Ibrahim Ebeid *, Al-Moharer.net

December 12, 2006

The ‘Creative Chaos’ in Iraq at its best, is a madness and insanity that reflects the neoconservatives’ doctrine in Washington. It is designed to control the “Middle East” in an effort to rip it apart further more, to weaken it, and to turn the region into insignificant sectarian and ethnic powerless mini states.

There are two reasons for creating such chaos: to protect the Zionist entity, known as the “Israeli State,” not because Iraq posed a threat to the United States. The illegal attack on Iraq and occupying it was one of these two reasons. Zelikow made statements about ’the unstated threat” during his tenure on a highly knowledgeable and well-connected body known as the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which reports directly to the President. He served on the board between 2001 and 2003. “Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 — it’s the threat against Israel,” Zelikow told a crowd at the University of Virginia on Sep. 10, 2002, speaking on a panel of foreign policy experts assessing the impact of 9/11 and the future of the war on the al-Qaeda.

The second is to control the oil. Mr. Bush always states that he will never leave Iraq unless the “mission is complete.” He also declared on Thursday August 24, 2006, that “to leave without finishing our mission will create a terrorist state in the heart of the Near East, in a country with enormous resources of petroleum, which the terrorist network can take for them.” To accomplish his scheme, the President has conceived a planned chaos in Iraq by creating a sectarian regime in the “Green Zone,” a small fortified section of Baghdad. This sectarian regime consists of several reactionary sectarian parties that were established by Iran to fight Arab Iraq.

Each party in the “government of the “Green Zone” has a militia and death squads that are killing hundreds of innocent people in Iraq who do not belong to their sect or do not agree with their agenda, be it Shia, Sunni, Christian or others. These sectarian racist parties were to replace the secular Arab Baath Socialist party; and the militias were to replace the Iraqi Army and the security forces. A chaos was created soon after the occupation, the museums were looted, and a heritage of more than ten thousand years old was destroyed. Bush and his henchmen like Rumsfeld called it ‘Creative Chaos’ to give birth to a new Iraq, a “democratic” Iraq. Is ruining an entire country and destroying its institution a “democracy or was it intended to erase the great Civilization of the Land of the Two Rivers?”

It seems to me that President Bush is a typical “ugly American” who remains ignorant of his surroundings. He has no knowledge of Arab culture that has its roots deep in history, certainly deeper and richer than that of the US or Western cultures. Bush insists to transform Iraq into a “model of freedom and democracy” for the rest of the “Middle East.” But Iraq was turned into the “Gates of Hell” against him and his plans. When President Bush and his cronies look at the map of the “Middle East,” they do not see the Arab people but rather vast oil fields and the illegal state of ” Israel.” Their dreams to control the area were shattered by the legitimate Iraqi Resistance that is scoring victory day after day.

The American President is sinking very fast in his ignorance and arrogance and he is dragging the United States with him. He is looking desperately for salvation and for a rescuer. Salvation he will never find in the Maliki “Government or in the Person of Abdul Aziz Al Hakim, a sectarian man who presides over a fascist sectarian organization, founded by Iran of the Mullahs. His allegiance is not for Bush and his cronies, but for Iran and the Mullahs, which makes him a major part of the problem.

Abdul Aziz Al Hakim, the Commander in Chief of the terrorist Badr Corps, and the head of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq along with the Mahdi Army of Sadr, the Chalabis and the Dawa “Islamic” Party are sending their death squads to kill and terrorize innocent people. The number of killed, according to the latest statistics reached an average of 400 a day in Baghdad and its surroundings, and yet President Bush receives this man in the White House to seek his help.

Is the United States looking to Iran for help? Isn’t Iran part of the problem and not the solution? Is the President of the United States doing like Nero setting more fire on Iraq to burn the green and dry grass at the same time? Is this the exit he is looking for, an exit to more chaos and more killing? The hands of the sectarian “government’ that Bush is supporting is stained with the blood of Iraqis. Their militias are cooperating with the Pasdaran, the Revolutionary Islamic Army of Iran, their purpose is to usurp southern Iraq and annex it to Iran to become part of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Mr. Bush has facilitated the way.

The occupation along with the sectarian allies is continuously targeting the education system. Myriads of professors, scientists and educators were assassinated and thousands left the country or stayed home because they were threatened. The latest such act took place in Al Anbar University on December 2, 2006 where many professors decided to quit and about 25 decided to move away from the University dwellings seeking safer places when the occupation arrested 12 professors falsely accusing them of supporting the Resistance and help making explosives. The professors who were targeted were in the Science Department, such as physics, chemistry and biology.

The cars which were used recently to kill about 200 innocent people in Al Thawra City (Al Sadr) belonged to the Badr Corps and they were shipped from Iran. The serial numbers were found on the chassis of the vehicles.

An Iraqi friend, who escaped the terror of occupation and their agents, told me that she was kidnapped by the gangs of Hakim, she was hit on the head with a rifle butt and her head was severely damaged because she is a Shia and married to a Sunni. She holds a doctorate degree in science. One day she applied for a teaching job at a Baghdad University; the interviewer told her that she will get the job if she joins the : Debaathification Committee”; the woman refused, and did not get the job.

“Freedom is completely lost in Iraq,” as an Iraqi friend told me, whom I shall call Palmyra for protection. Women are not encouraged to go to school any more, they cannot hold any jobs any more. They have to cover their heads and the entire body with dark cloaks, Iranian style of the Mullahs. And, yet, the President of the United States keeps saying that women are free in Iraq? Palmyra opened a beauty parlor in order to survive and earn an income.

The first day, some armed men from the Badr Corps came to her and asked her to remove the pictures of women with different hair styles hanging at the windows. She complied, and then later that evening, while she was sitting home, she received a phone call from one of the hairstylists telling her that the Badr militia attacked the beauty salon, and sprayed it with bullets, as everything was shattered and left in ruins and yet President Bush is seeking help from this man to create more chaos?

Even the hospitals are not safe anymore, Ali Al Shummari, the Minister of Health, a Sadrist, allows the militia of Sadr and Badr to enter the hospitals and kill people who have no allegiance to them or who do not belong to the “Shia” faith. Those who go to pick up the dead are being killed also. Hundreds of corpses are taken on daily basis from the hospitals and buried in mass graves, in Najaf and Karbala, with no names. Who will President Bush blame in the future for his act? Will he blame Saddam Hussein, the Resistance or the real perpetrators of the sectarian and the occupation forces? Maybe he will blame himself!

Fatima, a Palestinian from Iraq, told me that most of the Palestinians were forced to leave their homes and gather with relatives in Baladiyat section where some Palestinians live. Her cousin was killed by a missile attack few months ago and her family was evicted from their home which was given to them by the government of Nuri Al Said in 1948. She told me that a Palestinian delegation from Baghdad went to the city of Najaf to meet with Hakim asking for help, and his answer was “we have a plan to expel all the Arabs from Iraq and the Palestinians are on the top of the list. Go, disappear, you have no place in Iraq …” Then, they went to the Police and complained about the acts of the militias and the Police officer in charge told them “you are terrorists and you are supporting terrorism and Saddam Hussein.” And yet the President keeps deafening our ears with his speeches about the “young democracy” in Iraq, and he is supporting such men like Hakim and Maliki?

During the previous regimes in Iraq, security was dominant and harmony was prevalent. The Palestinians were respected and given homes to stay as guests until they go back to their country from which they were evicted by force, and now they are facing certain death and being terrorized by the occupation forces, their sectarian allies and death squads, the friends of Bush and Iran of the Mullahs. At many occasions, the Baath Party ascertained that Iran is a strategic partner with the US and the Zionist entity.

They share the same objectives to dismember the Arab homeland. Some people and movements have objected to this, defending Iran and saying: “Iran has an anti Zionist Islamic revolution and we should give it complete opportunity to prove it!” The opportunity was given and now we see the result on the ground, the organizations which were created by Iran, the sectarians who were brought by Bush are allied with the US, and they are part of the problem and not a solution. And their representative Abdul Aziz Hakim was a guest in the White House.

The American people and the Anti War Movement should understand that the only solution is the recognition of the Iraqi National Resistance, as the sole representative of the Iraqi people. The Resistance has already made its conditions for peace known that the Anti War Movement should accept, advocate and support, especially the American Anti War Movement.

* The author is a US Vietnam era veteran 25th Infantry Division and an anti war activist.

source:
http://www.al-moharer.net/mohhtm/i_ebeid252.htm

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BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW

Teacher calls Muslim student ‘terrorist’

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem

In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

Teacher calls Muslim student ‘terrorist’

JENNIFER MACEY: Since last year’s Cronulla riots, the New South Wales Anti-Discrimination board has been inundated by calls from Muslim Australians.

One of those calls came from a grade 11 student at Blakehurst High School in Sydney’s south-east, who lodged a complaint against his legal studies teacher for calling him a terrorist.

Wagih Zac Fares says he’s still hurt by the comment made in front of his classmates.

WAGIH ZAC FARES: I put my bag on the table, looking for a chair to sit at. I asked the girl next to that chair if the chair was free and her reply was yes. I sat down next to her, and on that table was her magazine, and I began flicking through it.

Mr Seymour then approached me, and said give me the magazine, in that aggressive tone right from the beginning. I said sir, please can I just put the magazine back in her bag?

He said no, you’ve come into my classroom, you’ve moved desks, and that’s when he outburst (sic), said no, I don’t want to negotiate with a terrorist.

When he said that it hit me, and I was shocked, I was embarrassed, I was just humiliated. And everyone stopped talking, all conversations dropped and looked at me.

Emotions were building up. That’s when I banged the table and said sir, that’s wrong. And unable to control my emotions, I began screaming out, I’m not a terrorist. How can you call me a terrorist?

I ran out of the classroom, punching walls, screaming I’m not a terrorist, how can you call me a terrorist?

JENNIFER MACEY: Wagih Fares says he ran from the classroom and was followed by his teacher, who apologised. When he returned to the school he picked up tables and threw them.

He says he hasn’t been able to return to his legal studies class and now wants the teacher transferred to another school.

WAGIH FARES: I cannot continue my education and to achieve my personal goals and go on to uni with this teacher there now.

The Department did take a while to come out with a result, and the result was that I had to either move schools, drop the subject, or do in-school tutoring, where I have to do… make the decisions, where I’ve done nothing wrong. It should be the teacher that must make the decision.

JENNIFER MACEY: The State’s Education Department has investigated the incident and disciplined the teacher. The investigation found that the teacher hadn’t intended to embarrass or humiliate the student.

The Department’s Regional Director Dr Phil Lambert says the teacher is truly sorry.

From National Nine News

A year on from the Cronulla riots, it’s words, not actions, that are causing pain.

Blakehurst High student Wagih Fares was called a terrorist by his legal studies teacher.

The conflict today is whether an apology and counselling is punishment enough.

I met Wagih, his parents and brothers and sisters at their Brighton Le Sands home this morning. They offered coffee to reporters and unwavering support for Wagih’s stand.

“It’s painful,” Wagih said. “It’s more than words.”

There’s no doubt that for this Lebanese Muslim family the teacher’s words caused deep wounds.

“We are Australians. My children were born in Australia,” Wagih’s mother said.

Wagih claims that in June he was told in a “loud and very aggressive voice” by legal studies teacher, Michael Seymour, to hand over a magazine.

When he refused the teacher responded: “I don’t want to negotiate with a terrorist.”

The Department of Education’s regional director of schools Phil Lambert said today the teacher had admitted his mistake and apologised.

“In the heat of the moment he said those words and he regrets having said them.”
…
“He was there to have a go at me,” replied Wagih. “I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m Lebanese.”

The Fares family want the teacher fired or transferred so that Wagih can return to his legal studies class. The Education Department believes the teacher has learned his lesson the hard way.

An Anti Discrimination Board investigation will make the final call on whether the teachers remorseful actions are punishment enough for his painful words.

From AAP

“I’ve done nothing wrong and to be called that word it’s painful. It is painful, that’s a good word to describe it, disgusted, it’s still hitting me now, it still gets me now,” Wagih said on Channel 10.

source:
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=18707

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-muslim voice-
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BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW

Routine and Systematic Torture Is at the Heart of America’s War on Terror

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem

In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

Routine and Systematic Torture Is at the Heart of America’s War on Terror

George Monbiot, The Guardian UK

Tuesday 12 December 2006

In the fight against cruelty, barbarism and extremism, America has embraced the very evils it claims to confront.

After thousands of years of practice, you might have imagined that every possible means of inflicting pain had already been devised. But you should never underestimate the human capacity for invention. United States interrogators, we now discover, have found a new way of destroying a human being.

Last week, defence lawyers acting for José Padilla, a US citizen detained as an “enemy combatant”, released a video showing a mission fraught with deadly risk – taking him to the prison dentist. A group of masked guards in riot gear shackled his legs and hands, blindfolded him with black-out goggles and shut off his hearing with headphones, then marched him down the prison corridor.

Is Padilla really that dangerous? Far from it: his warders describe him as so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for “a piece of furniture”. The purpose of these measures appeared to be to sustain the regime under which he had lived for more than three years: total sensory deprivation. He had been kept in a blacked-out cell, unable to see or hear anything beyond it. Most importantly, he had had no human contact, except for being bounced off the walls from time to time by his interrogators. As a result, he appears to have lost his mind. I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind is no longer there.

The forensic psychiatrist who examined him says that he “does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, ie, post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation”. José Padilla appears to have been lobotomised: not medically, but socially.

If this was an attempt to extract information, it was ineffective: the authorities held him without charge for three and half years. Then, threatened by a supreme court ruling, they suddenly dropped their claims that he was trying to detonate a dirty bomb. They have now charged him with some vague and lesser offences to do with support for terrorism. He is unlikely to be the only person subjected to this regime. Another “enemy combatant”, Ali al-Marri, claims to have been subject to the same total isolation and sensory deprivation, in the same naval prison in South Carolina. God knows what is being done to people who have disappeared into the CIA’s foreign oubliettes.

That the US tortures, routinely and systematically, while prosecuting its “war on terror” can no longer be seriously disputed. The Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project (DAA), a coalition of academics and human-rights groups, has documented the abuse or killing of 460 inmates of US military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantánamo Bay. This, it says, is necessarily a conservative figure: many cases will remain unrecorded. The prisoners were beaten, raped, forced to abuse themselves, forced to maintain “stress positions”, and subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation and mock executions.

The New York Times reports that prisoners held by the US military at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan were made to stand for up to 13 days with their hands chained to the ceiling, naked, hooded and unable to sleep. The Washington Post alleges that prisoners at the same airbase were “commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep” while kept, like Padilla and the arrivals at Guantánamo, “in black hoods or spray-painted goggles”.

Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argues that the photographs released from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq reflect standard CIA torture techniques: “stress positions, sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation”. The famous picture of the hooded man standing on a box, with wires attached to his fingers, shows two of these techniques being used at once. Unable to see, he has no idea how much time has passed or what might be coming next. He stands in a classic stress position – maintained for several hours, it causes excruciating pain. He appears to have been told that if he drops his arms he will be electrocuted. What went wrong at Abu Ghraib is that someone took photos. Everything else was done by the book.

Neither the military nor the civilian authorities have broken much sweat in investigating these crimes. A few very small fish have been imprisoned; a few others have been fined or reduced in rank; in most cases the authorities have either failed to investigate or failed to prosecute. The DAA points out that no officer has yet been held to account for torture practised by his subordinates. US torturers appear to enjoy impunity, until they are stupid enough to take pictures of each other.

But Padilla’s treatment also reflects another glorious American tradition: solitary confinement. Some 25,000 US prisoners are currently held in isolation – a punishment only rarely used in other democracies. In some places, like the federal prison in Florence, Colorado, they are kept in sound-proofed cells and might scarcely see another human being for years on end. They may touch or be touched by no one. Some people have been kept in solitary confinement in the US for more than 20 years.

At Pelican Bay in California, where 1,200 people are held in the isolation wing, inmates are confined to tiny cells for 22 and a half hours a day, then released into an “exercise yard” for “recreation”. The yard consists of a concrete well about 3.5 metres in length with walls 6 metres high and a metal grille across the sky. The recreation consists of pacing back and forth, alone.

The results are much as you would expect. As National Public Radio reveals, more than 10% of the isolation prisoners at Pelican Bay are now in the psychiatric ward, and there’s a waiting list. Prisoners in solitary confinement, according to Dr Henry Weinstein, a psychiatrist who studies them, suffer from “memory loss to severe anxiety to hallucinations to delusions … under the severest cases of sensory deprivation, people go crazy.” People who went in bad and dangerous come out mad as well. The only two studies conducted so far – in Texas and Washington state – both show that the recidivism rates for prisoners held in solitary confinement are worse than for those who were allowed to mix with other prisoners. If we were to judge the US by its penal policies, we would perceive a strange beast: a Christian society that believes in neither forgiveness nor redemption.

From this delightful experiment, US interrogators appear to have extracted a useful lesson: if you want to erase a man’s mind, deprive him of contact with the rest of the world. This has nothing to do with obtaining information: torture of all kinds – physical or mental – produces the result that people will say anything to make it end. It is about power, and the thrilling discovery that in the right conditions one man’s power over another is unlimited. It is an indulgence which turns its perpetrators into everything they claim to be confronting.

President Bush maintains that he is fighting a war against threats to the “values of civilised nations”: terror, cruelty, barbarism and extremism. He asked his nation’s interrogators to discover where these evils are hidden. They should congratulate themselves. They appear to have succeeded.

source:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121206B.shtml

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-muslim voice-
______________________________________
BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW

West’s attempt to divide Iraq on sectarian grounds

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem

In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

West’s attempt to divide Iraq on sectarian grounds

Abdujabbar al-Samarai , Azzaman

Published December 3, 2006

Several years before the 2003 U.S. invasion, western media had already divided the Iraqi society into several ethnic and sectarian groups. Even western powers, particularly the U.S. and the U.K. had their prior invasion policies based on the fact that Iraq was divisible into at least three separate ethnic, sectarian and geographical regions.

The two powers even resorted to military means to translate their strategy of partitioning the country on the ground. They create two no-fly zones one in the north and one in the south ostensibly to protect the northern Sunni Kurds and the southern Arab Shiites from the ‘oppressive’ Arab Sunni regime in the center.

When the two powers occupied Iraq, they pressed ahead with their strategy. Instead of working for a unified and multicolored Iraq, they began driving one wedge after another between the different components of the society.

In the pre-invasion period they had two no-fly zones. In the post-invasion period they destroyed the country’s institutions in which the various sects, faiths and nationalities were represented.

In the institutions they dismantled differences like those surfacing currently in Iraq were non-existent. There were Arab Shiites and Sunni Kurds serving at the various levels of administration. In fact many Iraqis would even not bother to ask whether the president of a university, the dean of a college, the governor of a province or even the head of the security or intelligence at the provincial levels was Shiite, Sunni, Christian or Kurd.

There were Christian and Shiite Baathists at the head of Baath party organizations in many provinces in Iraq. Iraqis rarely asked whether the boss who reported to former leader Saddam Hussein was Shiite, Sunni, Kurd or Christian. Those were rarely issue of concern to them.

Today, conditions are different in what is supposed to be a democratic Iraq. Every where and at any level of government – civil or military – the first thing to know is who is who at all ranks of the newly formed institutions.

Not only that. The ministries are now divided on sectarian and ethnic grounds. So are almost all the new institutions the invaders or their lackeys have set up. A ministry could be Shiite, for example. Not only that. It could be under the hegemony of a certain Shiite faction. The minister owes his presence and loyalty to the faction he belongs to and not to the nation.

Every new brick the invaders added to our institutions is tainted with sectarianism. The first thing Iraqis would like to know now is whether the police or military commander of the force assigned to protect them is Shiite, Sunni or Kurd and which faction he belongs to. Some communities would rather have the anti-U.S. rebels or even al-Qaeda-related insurgents govern their areas than relinquishing control to units led by commanders of opposite sect.

The invaders are the reason of this mistrust. They nourished these divisions right in the aftermath of their occupation. They are to blame for the carnage and atrocities taking place now because they fueled the sectarian divide in a country where sectarian borders are impossible to draw.

Take the Iraqi Arabs who make up more than 80 per cent of the population. The major Arab tribes like the Shammar, the Zubaid, the Rabiaa, the Jibour, the Tai, the Iza and many others straddle the sectarian divide the invaders have created. These tribes are composed of both Arab Sunni and Shiite members who for centuries defended each other and have been connected through bonds of blood and marriage.

Kurds and Turkmen, the other two major minorities, are present throughout the country. There are about one million Kurds in Baghdad alone and it is almost impossible to have them distanced from the rest because of the ties of marriage and shared cultural and religious values.

The invaders have indeed destroyed the fabric of coexistence and tolerance that unified the country. This is why most Iraqis would rather have them leave in humiliation. Their presence is part of the problem and not solution.

source:
http://www.azzaman.com/english/index.asp?fname=opinion%5C2006-12-03%5Ckurd1.htm

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-muslim voice-
______________________________________
BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW

Video : Homeless because they are Sunni

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem

In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

Video : Homeless because they are Sunni

Reuters

December 11, 2006

Scores of Sunni families have marched through a mixed area of Baghdad after gunmen from a Shi’ite militia forced then from their homes.

Police say Shi’ite militias stormed the religiously mixed Hurriya neighbourhood in western Baghdad on Saturday, killing two people and forcing dozens of Sunni families to flee.

The evictions took place as the outgoing Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited U.S. troops in Baghdad.

Sonia Legg reports.

source:
http://today.reuters.co.uk/tv/videoChannel.aspx?storyid=bb2c7f0354e587c6f1ab79d3889bc7304a0c9b7b

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-muslim voice-
______________________________________
BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW

US Terrorize The World – 22 Dzulqaidah 1427 H (13.12.06)

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem

In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

The 9/11 Truth Movement’s Dangers

According to a July poll conducted by Scripps News Service, one-third of Americans think the government either carried out the 9/11 attacks or intentionally allowed them to happen in order to provide a pretext for war in the Middle East. This is at once alarming and unsurprising. Alarming, because if tens of millions of Americans really believe their government was complicit in the murder of 3,000 of their fellow citizens, they seem remarkably sanguine about this fact. By and large, life continues as before, even though tens of millions of people apparently believe they are being governed by mass murderers. Unsurprising, because the government these Americans suspect of complicity in 9/11 has acquired a justified reputation for deception: weapons of mass destruction, secret prisons, illegal wiretapping. What else are they hiding?
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/08/opinion/main2242387.shtml

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9/11 : Anthrax attack on US Congress made by scientists and covered up by FBI, expert says

The terrorists who perpetrated the 2001 anthrax attack on Congress likely were US government scientists at the army’s Ft. Detrick, MD., bioterrorism lab having access to “moonsuits” that enabled them to safely process and manufacture super-weapons-grade anthrax, an eminent authority on the subject says.

Although only a “handful” of scientists had the ability to perpetrate the crime, the culprit among them may never be identified as the FBI ordered the destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames, IA., from which the Ft. Detrick lab got its pathogens, the authority said.

This action makes it impossible “to pin-point precisely where, when, and from whom these bio-agents had originated,” said Dr. Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois at Champaign.
http://www.metimes.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20061211-033912-3373r

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9/11 : Routine and Systematic Torture Is at the Heart of America’s War on Terror

In the fight against cruelty, barbarism and extremism, America has embraced the very evils it claims to confront.

After thousands of years of practice, you might have imagined that every possible means of inflicting pain had already been devised. But you should never underestimate the human capacity for invention. United States interrogators, we now discover, have found a new way of destroying a human being.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121206B.shtml

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9/11 : The Road To Guantanamo

In this compelling docudrama by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, the ‘Tipton Three’ narrate their own experiences in America’s controversial offshore detention camp. Three young British Muslims tell the story of how they came to be in US custody at Guantánamo for over two years, and discuss the Kafkaesque horrors that awaited them there, until finally they were released without charge or apology.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15880.htm

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9/11 : “I Witnessed The Degradation And Murder Of Detainees”

Video: Former Guantanamo prisoner talks about his life and treatment by the US forces.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15881.htm

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Teacher calls Muslim student ‘terrorist’

He said no, you’ve come into my classroom, you’ve moved desks, and that’s when he outburst (sic), said no, I don’t want to negotiate with a terrorist.
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=18707

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655,000 Excess Deaths In Iraq Since U.S. Invasion?

Francesco Checchi, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, looks at the lambasting a new report on Iraq deaths has got from hostile governments. He has worked on mortality surveys in Angola, Darfur, Thailand and Uganda, and written a publication “Interpreting and using mortality data in humanitarian emergencies” for the Humanitarian Practice Network.
http://www.alertnet.org/thefacts/reliefresources/116066724942.htm

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Full Report: A publication “Interpreting and using mortality data in humanitarian emergencies” [PDF]

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/lib.nsf/db900SID/KKEE-6GEQEN/$FILE/networkpaper52.pdf?OpenElement

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THE UGLY AMERICAN WHO REMAINS IGNORANT

The ‘Creative Chaos’ in Iraq at its best, is a madness and insanity that reflects the neoconservatives’ doctrine in Washington. It is designed to control the “Middle East” in an effort to rip it apart further more, to weaken it, and to turn the region into insignificant sectarian and ethnic powerless mini states.
http://www.al-moharer.net/mohhtm/i_ebeid252.htm

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It Was True Then and Its True Now : Blair Is A Coward

The current American elite is the Third Reich of our times, although this distinction ought not to let us forget that they have merely accelerated more than half a century of unrelenting American state terrorism: from the atomic bombs dropped cynically on Japan as a signal of their new power to the dozens of countries invaded, directly or by proxy, to destroy democracy wherever it collided with American “interests”, such as a voracious appetite for the world’s resources, like oil.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15877.htm

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Iraqi Quagmire Haunts NATO Riga Summit

It was the Iraqi resistance in Iraq which exposed the limits of US military power sending a resounding warning to aggressors and occupiers of other people’s lands.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15886.htm

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The Most Dangerous Place in Iraq

Dispatch: While the world focuses its attention on Baghdad, U.S. troops are killed in Iraq’s Anbar Province in greater numbers than anywhere else in the war-torn country

There wasn’t much blood on the last casualty of the day in Ramadi, the capital of al-Anbar Province. The bandages on the face of the American soldier who arrived at the U.S. field hospital in the area around midnight Dec. 6 were only a little red as medics crowded around him at the operating table. Navy Commander Carlos Brown, the chief surgeon at Camp Ramadi, peered at the bullet wound in the soldier’s lower face as his team quickly cut clothes off the man and readied surgical equipment. “Stop,” Brown said suddenly. All hands fell away from the table, and everyone grew silent. “He’s dead.”
http://www.time.com/time/world/printout/0,8816,1568724,00.html

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Jordanians say faced torture by US in Iraq

AMMAN/BAGHDAD – Three Jordanians who were freed from Iraqi jails last November said they were subjected to “indescribable psychological and physical torture” by the US forces during detention.

The Jordanians – Hassan Sharafat, 56, Naji al-Waladat, 35, and Ahmed Rashad al-Jabaari, 35 – said on Tuesday in a press conference organised by the Arab Organisation for Human Rights (AOHR) that they were held for more than three years without a court order. Sharafat and Waladat worked as truck drivers between Jordan and Iraq while al-Jabaari was a businessman in Iraq.
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/iraq/?id=18724

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West’s attempt to divide Iraq on sectarian grounds

Several years before the 2003 U.S. invasion, western media had already divided the Iraqi society into several ethnic and sectarian groups. Even western powers, particularly the U.S. and the U.K. had their prior invasion policies based on the fact that Iraq was divisible into at least three separate ethnic, sectarian and geographical regions.
http://www.azzaman.com/english/index.asp?fname=opinion%5C2006-12-03%5Ckurd1.htm

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Video : Homeless because they are Sunni

Scores of Sunni families have marched through a mixed area of Baghdad after gunmen from a Shi’ite militia forced then from their homes.

Police say Shi’ite militias stormed the religiously mixed Hurriya neighbourhood in western Baghdad on Saturday, killing two people and forcing dozens of Sunni families to flee.

The evictions took place as the outgoing Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited U.S. troops in Baghdad.
http://today.reuters.co.uk/tv/videoChannel.aspx?storyid=bb2c7f0354e587c6f1ab79d3889bc7304a0c9b7b

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Website: Alive In iraq

See: http://www.aliveinbaghdad.org/

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Poll: Iraq Going Badly And Getting Worse

Only 4 percent say the U.S. should keep fighting as it is doing now.
http://cbs4.com/topstories/topstories_story_345202005.html

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Sunnis shooting down aircraft in Anbar with missiles?

Another helicopter went down in Anbar, no fatalities, 18 wounded. This is the third aircraft to go down in Anbar in two weeks.
http://bornatthecrestoftheempire.blogspot.com/2006/12/sunnis-shooting-down-aircraft-in-anbar.html

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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Monday,11 December 2006.

• Resistance bomb blasts US Humvee in al-Fallujah midday Monday.
• Resistance sharpshooter kills three puppet troops in al-Fallujah Monday afternoon, puppet troops respond to sharpshooter attack by killing four civilians, including a 9-year old boy.
• After that massacre of civilians by the Iraqi puppet army troops the Resistance sharpshooter opened fire at the puppet troops again, killing two more of them.
• Salah ad-Din Province declares day of civil disobedience Monday to protest US killings in as-Siniyah, al-Ishaqi.
• Resistance bomb leaves US soldier reported dead in al-Hawijah Monday morning.
• Resistance bombards checkpoint at eastern approach to al-Fallujah Sunday afternoon.
• Battle in Baghdad’s al-Ghazaliyah disables two US Humvees.
• Iraqi Resistance car bomber blasts into puppet police checkpoint Monday morning.
• Five elementary school teachers kidnapped in ad-Dujayl Monday.
• Province declares day of civil disobedience to protest US killings in as-Siniyah, al-Ishaqi.
• Resistance fighters deployed on the streets of the protesting cities of Samarra’, Bayji, Tikrit, and ad-Dulu’iyah.
• Resistance fighters blast headquarters of puppet “National Guard” on Sunday.
• Resistance bombards pro-Iranian Jaysh al-Mahdi headquarters on Sunday.
• Resistance bomb destroys US Humvee in al-Latifiyah Sunday.

http://www.albasrah.net/pages/mod.php?mod=art&lapage=../en_articles_2006/1206/iraqiresistancereport_111206.htm

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Suicide bomb, US forces kill 13 in Afghanistan

A suicide bomber blew himself up at a governor’s house in southern Afghanistan Tuesday, killing eight people, while US-led security forces shot dead four “militants” and a teenage girl.
http://www.thedailystar.net/2006/12/13/d61213130595.htm

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Afghan ‘civilians’ killed in raid

Khost province’s governor has said the four killed in the US-led raid on Tuesday were civilians, and that at least four others were injured, some seriously, when troops attacked their house.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/8CE8399F-E9CC-42B6-92B0-DBD182A51A0C.htm

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US Troops Will Be Forced Out of Afghanistan

In a rare video message, Afghan insurgent leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar claims that American troops will be forced out of Afghanistan like the Soviets before them, AP said.
http://www.iran-daily.com/1385/2732/html/politic.htm#s195372

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Holocaust Denial or Smart Move?

Why would a man of obvious intelligence, as President Ahmedinejad of Iran surely is, want to provoke the West by inspiring a conference meant to look at the Holocaust? What is really behind the ‘Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision’ conference?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15884.htm

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The Anatomy of a Zionist Smear Campaign

Zionism means one thing: sustaining Jewish rule, dominance and control over the land that the Zionists themselves claim shall be populated exclusively (well, that’s the goal, ladies and gentlemen) by Jews. The land they themselves have determined they are entitled to is Palestine, which happened to have already been densely populated by another national group, the Palestinians. Zionism, when we take off the blinders and look at it practically, is neither a noble mission nor a liberation movement. Those who support Zionism may not approve of every instrument it uses to keep this control, but making this land into a land for Jews automatically means engaging in unethical behaviour. It means committing some atrocities and violating international law. There is no debate here, Israel was founded in an illegitimate and unilateral manner. This is a problem that has never been resolved.
http://www.uruknet.de/?colonna=m&p=28954&l=x&size=1&hd=0

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Israel denies Palestinian children are jailed illegally

Palestinian Layth Ghalib Bedwan, 14, was arrested and detained by the Israeli authorities on 28 August 2006. Since then, his family has waited anxiously for him to return home.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/a58bc57c715c8bdd4eedfe3f7bd7fa6f.htm

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Lebanon’s Army captures Israeli Mossad ‘Terrorist Ring’

The Lebanese army has said it had captured members of a terrorist network allegedly working for the Israeli Mossad and that a suspect confessed to his role in assassinating Hezbollah and Palestinian officials.
http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2006/06/lebanons_army_c.php

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Islamic courts threaten war

The Islamic Courts Union has given Ethiopia a week to withdraw its troops from Somalia and says it will attack any that do not leave.
http://voanews.com/english/2006-12-12-voa33.cfm

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Nikola Kavaja: Interview with an assassin

The CIA had staged several assassination attempts on Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavian President at the time, claims the former CIA associate Nikola Kavaja
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/article2055456.ece

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Italian Court Moves Closer To Indicting CIA Agents

Over 30 U.S. and Italian intelligence agents may face charges after the extraordinary rendition of Egyptian cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr in Milan
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7005822965

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Government Spying Goes Global

Welcome to the national insecurity state, where our virtual identities are continually assessed for the risk we pose to the state and the normal relationship between the individual and the state in democratic societies is turned on its head. Now, the individual answers to the state and woe betide the person who is branded with a high “risk score.”
http://www.alternet.org/story/45285

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Wolfowitz Clashes With World Bank Staff and Mideast Chief Exits

Half of the bank’s 29 highest-level executives have departed since Wolfowitz, the former U.S. deputy Defense secretary and an architect of President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, took office in June 2005.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601070&sid=a6VAazXTmeWc&refer=politics#

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60 million Americans living on less than $7 a day

US income figures show staggering rise in social inequality
See: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/dec2006/ineq-d12.shtml

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Economic Apartheid Kills

The Bush administration successfully talked up the global threat from terrorism while it pursued domestic and foreign policies promoting economic apartheid, a far greater and more pervasive threat to national and global stability.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15885.htm

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Engelhard: Carter’s Book is Mein Kampf, Protocols

Novelist Jack Engelhard, minus a firm grip on reality, absurdly lambastes former president Jimmy Carter as the author of a modern day version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Engelhard is whirled into a tizzy by Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid published recently by Simon & Schuster, not exactly the publishing wing of Hamas.

“Israel’s continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land,” writes Carter.

For Englehard, however, telling this simple and undeniable truth is akin to “Holocaust Part 2,” and is downright biblical, as in the Old Testament part of the Bible. “Historians tell us that Pharaoh was the first to stir up the multitudes against the Jews, and we have it from Scripture that a new Pharaoh will arise to torment us from generation to generation.” Carter, according to Englehard, is this “new Pharaoh,” arrived to persecute the Jews, never mind the colonization Carter writes about is an established and verifiable fact, one systematically ignored by Englehard.
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=693

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Jesus Camp

Jesus camp is a rare document. It is one of the few honest portrayals of the right wing evangelist’s movement. The documentary follows Pastor Becky Fisher and her congregation. Ms. Fischer, an evangelical Christian, helps run Kids on Fire, a summer camp in Devils Lake, N.D., that grooms children to be soldiers in “God’s army.” The result is a very disturbing film.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15878.htm

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SANTA MIGHT NOT PASS THROUGH SECURITY AT BETHLEHEM THIS YEAR

With the Christmas holiday approaching, the annual pilgrimage to Bethlehem might be quite limited this year. Economic hardships in most Palestinian areas as well as the difficulty in getting there because of the apartheid wall has put a damper on the celebrations weeks before they even start.

How ironic that the very place that the ‘Prince of Peace’ was born in is now a war torn city…. ironic and sad.

There is still time to change the situation, but somehow it seems that the spirit of Christmas will be best celebrated elsewhere this year.

The following report appeared on Yahoo News this evening….

Tough times in birthplace of Jesus as Christmas nears
http://desertpeace.blogspot.com/2006/12/santa-might-not-pass-through-security.html

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-muslim voice-
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BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW