Independent.co.uk
Prisoners are being summarily executed in the government's high-security detention centre in Baghdad. Robert Fisk reports
Tuesday, 7 October 2008
Like all wars, the dark, untold stories of the Iraqi conflict drain from its shattered landscape like the filthy waters of the Tigris. And still the revelations come.
The Independent has learnt that secret executions are being carried out in the prisons run by Nouri al-Maliki's "democratic" government.
The hangings are carried out regularly – from a wooden gallows in a small, cramped cell – in Saddam Hussein's old intelligence headquarters at Kazimiyah. There is no public record of these killings in what is now called Baghdad's "high-security detention facility" but most of the victims – there have been hundreds since America introduced "democracy" to Iraq – are said to be insurgents, given the same summary justice they mete out to their own captives.
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w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
Last update - 01:53 02/10/2008
By Gideon Levy
White smoke emerged from the tribal campfire on Rosh Hashanah Eve, announcing Channel 2 News' choice for man of the year. Commentators from the most popular and influential media outlet in the country announced their decision after holding a shallow and absurd discussion. "[He is] a man who has done only good," political analyst Emmanuel Rosen said of the selection, speaking on behalf of judging panel. Who is this rare and illustrious person who did so much good? Mossad chief Meir Dagan. An excited Rosen added: "[He is] a man who would cut the throats of terrorists with his own hands, using a box-cutter - a man of action with a knife in his teeth."
By way of supporting their decision they presented a "rare journalistic achievement": a glimpse of a meeting between our hero Dagan and outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The images echoed Communist Romania or North Korea: Olmert hosting Meirkeh, as the Mossad head is called by U.S. President George Bush, in his office. Both said very little in front of the cameras. "You did well," the prime minister said to Rosen, about the recognition. Then two character witnesses were called in. Major Gen. (res.) Yossi Ben Hanan spoke about how Dagan once killed a terrorist with his own hands, though of course he did not specify how, and reminisced about how they had once traveled together in the Far East. National Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer added: "I recommend that you don't get too close to him - I suggest your story had best be favorable."
Later the panel made intimations about his doings in the past year: The killing of senior Hezbollah leader Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus, a few more mysterious and unnecessary killings and, of course, the bombing of the alleged nuclear site in Syria, operations that they said should make Meirke deserving of "at least 10 Israel Prizes."
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Updated, 10:05 a.m. | A New York City police lieutenant who gave the order to fire a Taser stun gun at a man who then fell to his death in Brooklyn committed suicide at Floyd Bennett Field early on Thursday, law enforcement officials said. The lieutenant, Michael W. Pigott, a 21-year veteran of the force, had been placed on modified assignment without his gun and badge after he gave the order to a sergeant to fire the Taser at a Bedford-Stuyvesant man, Iman Morales.
Mr. Morales, naked and with apparent signs of emotional disturbance, fell to his death from a building ledge after an officer shot him with the Taser, at the instruction of Lieutenant Pigott. Mr. Morales had been yelling at passers-by and swinging a long light bulb tube at officers before he fell.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said in a statement:
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Reports of tragedy filtering out of Galveston and Bolivar
by: Robert Ryland
Tue Sep 16, 2008 at 03:44 PM CDT
The following is from an email sent to me by a good friend in Nacogdoches whose buddy has been over Galveston - names have been edited out to protect the folks those who relayed the report. Also relayed from this guy and others: persons going into the restricted area are apparently being patted down and cameras are being confiscated, by Army and Coast Guard personnel. Okay...I've got some news on this front. Take it for what it's worth, but the guy I got it from is someone I trust to raise my children... He's never once lied to me...ever. And we're close.
He's in a pretty high-up supervisory position for a refinery down on the coast.
His refinery has some equipment and lines in and around Galveston county, and before they were to bring them back on line he and his crew had to inspect the place for damage and potential hazards. So they were given permission....after a background check....to helicopter in and inspect, which meant coming in over Galveston.
I kid you not when I say that he told me they saw AT LEAST 1500 bodies in trees scattered about Galveston. They also saw a lot in various ditches and marshes, esp. on the north side of East Galv. Bay, east side of Trinity Bay, and in the marshes between I-45 and Seabrook/Clear Lake/Deer Park.
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If true, someone has called for a gag order. Who else could approve this?
Rights org: Israeli settlers slay Palestinian shepherd
27 September 2008
It Can Happen Here!
By: Uri Avnery
THE GERMAN name Sternhell means bright as the stars. The name fits: the positions of Professor Ze'ev Sternhell indeed stand out sharply against the darkness of the sky. He warns against Israeli fascism. This week, Israeli fascists laid a pipe-bomb at the entrance of his apartment and he was lightly injured.
The choice of victim seems surprising at first. But the perpetrators knew what they were doing.
They did not attack the activists who demonstrate every week against the Separation Wall in Bil'in and Na'alin. They did not attack the leftists who mobilize every year - this year, too - to help the Palestinians pick their olives near the most dangerous settlements. They did not attack the "Women in Black" who demonstrate every Friday, or the women of "Machsom Watch", who keep an eye on events at the army checkpoints. They attacked a person whose entire activity is in the academic field.
The struggles on the ground are essential. But their main purpose is to influence public opinion. That is the main battlefield, and there the man of letters has an important part to play.
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Comment
By Paul de Rooij
Uri Avnery's insight into Israeli society is usually worth reading, but sometimes he produces less than useful commentary. For example:
The fanatical settlers know that they have lost the support of public opinion in Israel, and that ordinary people consider them dangerous thugs. Their actions, as seen on television, arouse distaste, even abhorrence. The vision of "All of Eretz-Israel" has not only lost altitude – it has crashed on the ground of reality. The Zealots are acting out of weakness and frustration.
Israel is a colonial project – all of it – and Avnery is suggesting that the cat is changing its stripes. First, it is silly to suggest that the government is reducing its support for the settlers or is thinking of removing them. On the contrary, the settlement project continues with full government support. So much for the "weakness and frustration" of the zealots. This is not a realistic interpretation.
Avnery's interpretation of the wall is mistaken too, see:
The discussion about the borders is still going on, but the majority sees the Separation Wall as the future border. (As we made clear right from the beginning, the wall was not really being constructed in order to keep out Palestinian suicide bombers, as was claimed, but as a future border between the two states.)
One only has to listen to the architect of the wall (Gen. Ilan Paz), the intellectual "father of the wall" (Soffer) or the one determining its route (Tirza) to know that the wall is a temporary tool. The wall was built to suck out the oxygen from the Palestinian society, to fragment it, and to impose draconian military rule. The purpose of the wall is to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians and then to remove the wall. The Israeli leaders don't think in terms of "two states"; for the Palestinians they have Bantustans or reservations in mind. In other words, the settlers are religious fascists, and the current Israeli establishment are politico-military fascists.
Independent.co.uk
Robert Fisk's World: Bush rescues Wall Street but leaves his soldiers to die in Iraq
Until the elections, the people in the Middle East are yesterday’s men
Saturday, 27 September 2008
It was a weird week to be in the United States. On Tuesday, secretary of the treasury Henry Paulson told us that "this is all about the American taxpayer – that's all we care about". But when I flipped the page on my morning paper, I came across the latest gloomy statistic which Americans should care more about. "As of Wednesday evening, 4,162 US service members and 11 Defence Department civilians had been identified as having died in the Iraq war." By grotesque mischance, $700bn – the cost of George Bush's Wall Street rescue cash – is about the same figure as the same President has squandered on his preposterous war in Iraq, the war we have now apparently "won" thanks to the "surge" – for which, read "escalation" – in Baghdad. The fact that the fall in casualties coincides with the near-completion of the Shia ethnic cleansing of Sunni Muslims is not part of the story.
Indeed, a strange narrative is now being built into the daily history of America. First we won the war in Afghanistan by overthrowing the evil, terrorist-protecting misogynist Islamist crazies called the Taliban, setting up a democratic government under the exotically dressed Hamid Karzai. Then we rushed off to Iraq and overthrew the evil, terrorist-protecting, nuclear-weaponised, secular Baathist crazies under Saddam, setting up a democratic government under the pro-Iranian Shia Nouri al-Maliki. Mission accomplished. Then, after 250,000 Iraqi deaths – or half a million or a million, who cares? – we rushed back to Kabul and Kandahar to win the war all over again in Afghanistan. The conflict now embraces our old chums in Pakistan, the Saudi-financed, American-financed Interservices Intelligence Agency whose Taliban friends – now attacked by our brave troops inside Pakistani sovereign territory – again control half of Afghanistan.
We are, in fact, now fighting a war in what I call Irakistan. It's hopeless; it's a mess; it's shameful; it's unethical and it's unwinnable and no wonder the Wall Street meltdown was greeted with such relief by Messrs Obama and McCain. They couldn't suspend their campaigns to discuss the greatest military crisis in America's history since Vietnam – but for Wall Street, no problem. The American taxpayer – "that's all we care about". Mercifully for the presidential candidates, they don't have to debate the hell-disaster of Iraq any more, nor US-Israeli relations, nor Exxon or Chevron or BP-Mobil or Shell. George Bush's titanic if mythical battle between good and evil has transmogrified into the conflict between good taxpayers and evil bankers. Phew! No entanglement in the lives and deaths of the people of the Middle East. Until the elections – barring another 9/11 – they are yesterday's men and women.
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Car bomb kills 17 in Syrian capital
By ALBERT AJI and BASSEM MROUE, Associated Press Writers 16 minutes ago
A car bomb went off near a security complex in the Syrian capital of Damascus on Saturday, killing 17 people and injuring 14 others in the deadliest attack to strike the country in more than a decade, the Syrian government announced.
A car packed with 440 pounds of explosives blew up on a highway in a southern residential neighborhood shattering dozens of car and apartment windows. The charred booby-trapped car was seen sitting in the street near a primary school as firefighters stood near a wide crater believed to be caused by the blast.
The explosion knocked down part of a 13-foot high wall surrounding a security complex that houses several buildings in the Sidi Kadad area. Hours after the morning explosion, traffic returned to normal on the highway, but dozens of plainclothes Syrian police lined the road.
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Posted by Shawn Levy September 27, 2008 06:09AM
Making "Exodus," circa 1960Fast Eddie Felson. Hud Bannon. Cool Hand Luke. Butch Cassidy. The guy in the race car. The guy on the salad dressing bottle. The blue-eyed dreamboat. The committed public citizen. The husband of a half-century. The father of six.
According to press releases from his his charitable organizations, Newman's Own Foundation and the Hole in the Wall Gang Camps, Paul Newman died Friday at age 83 at his long-time home in Westport, Connecticut, and with his passing, more has been lost than just a good and fine man.
For a half-century, on screen and off, the actor Paul Newman embodied certain tendencies in the American male character: active and roguish and earnest and sly and determined and vulnerable and brave and humble and reliable and compassionate and fair. He was a man of his time, a part of his time, and that time ranged from World War II to the contemporary era of digitally animated feature films.
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Most readers of this blog (i.e., 3–5 of you) know that Sam Zell and fellow tabloid-corporatist Rupert Murdoch sit on the board of directors at The Associated Press which, in this blog’s opinion, is the biggest mouthpiece for statism and empire among corporate news media. Most readers will also know that AP’s coverage of U.S. foreign policy is tabloid.
In part six of War by Deception, Ryan Dawson reports on Zell (@ 5:40) and others, in connection to some criminal and treasonous activities.
Written by detainthis
September 13, 2008New York man falls to death from ledge after being Tasered by police
1 hour, 10 minutes ago
By The Associated Press
NEW YORK - A naked, distraught man fell to his death after a New York City police officer shocked him with a Taser stun gun as he stood on a building ledge.
Authorities say 35-year-old Iman Morales was pronounced dead in hospital after his three-metre fall Wednesday. Police said he suffered serious head trauma when he sit the sidewalk.
In a video posted on the website of the New York Post, Morales can be seen clambering along a fire escape until he reaches a ledge and begins swinging a large fluorescent light bulb at officers below.
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Monday, September 22, 2008
ISLAMABAD: The US Department of Defence at Pentagon has confirmed the death of its two marines in Hotel Marriott blast in Islamabad. According to GEO News, the Pentagon said on Sunday its two marines succumbed to injuries in the blast. The soldiers were deployed in the US embassy in Islamabad, it said. Pentagon said the names of the US marines could not be revealed prior to informing families of the victims.
Link
Sat Sep 20, 2008 7:47pm EDT
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A Palestinian woman died of injuries sustained on Sunday when she was shoved to the ground by Israeli soldiers conducting an arrest raid in her village in the occupied West Bank, witnesses and a medical official said.
They said Mariam Ayyad, aged around 60, had tried to block the path of troops who came to Abu Dis, near Jerusalem, overnight to detain students lodging in a property she owned.
"She went outside in order to prevent them arresting someone from her house," one of the students, who would only be identified by his nickname, Abu Yaffa, told Reuters. "They knocked her down and there was blood on her head."
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w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
Last update - 15:04 19/09/2008
Twilight Zone
By Gideon Levy
Nothing helped. Not the pleas, not the cries of the woman in labor, not the father's explanations in excellent Hebrew, nor the blood that flowed in the car. The commander of the checkpoint, a fine Israeli who had completed an officers' course, heard the cries, saw the women writhing in pain in the back seat of the car, listened to the father's heartrending pleas and was unmoved. The heart of the Israeli officer was indifferent and cruel. For over an hour, he would not let the car with the young woman in labor pass through the Hawara checkpoint on the way to the hospital in Nablus. Not to Tel Aviv; but to Nablus; not for shopping, not for work; but to get to the hospital in an emergency. Nothing helped.
Nahil Abu-Rada is not the first woman to lose her baby this way because of the occupation, and she won't be the last. At least a half-dozen checkpoint births that ended in death have been documented here over the years, and nothing has changed. No punishments, no lessons, not even a request for forgiveness from parents who lose their children because of the coldheartedness of soldiers.
The occupation kills - never has this slogan sounded so true as on that night, two weeks ago, at the Hawara checkpoint south of Nablus. No convoluted excuse or explanation from the Israel Defense Forces spokesman (military sources were quoted the day after the incident, making this outrageous comment: "This baby would have died anyway") can erase the simple, chilling fact that for officers and soldiers in the occupation army we have established, human feeling has become alien, at least when it comes to Palestinians. Or the fact that there are still officers and soldiers in the IDF who behave with such lack of feeling toward a woman in labor who is about to lose her child.
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Suicide bomber kills at least 40 at Pakistan hotel
1 hour, 17 minutes ago
By Zeeshan Haider
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A suicide car bomber attacked the Marriott Hotel in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Saturday, killing at least 40 people and turning the hotel into an inferno, police said.
As flames engulfed the hotel, which is popular with foreigners, police said there were still people trapped inside.
"A car laden with explosives rammed the gate at the Marriott and so far we have brought out 40 dead bodies, but the number could well be higher," police chief Asghar Raza Gardazi said.
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Child pulled from rubble after airstrike on alleged insurgents, military says
The Associated Press
updated 5:23 a.m. MT, Fri., Sept. 19, 2008
BAGHDAD - The U.S. military says seven Iraqis have been killed in a raid by American troops backed by attack aircraft targeting al-Qaida in Iraq.
A military statement says those killed Friday in the Sunni town of Adwar include four suspected insurgents and three women. It says a child has been pulled from the rubble and is being treated at a nearby U.S. base.
The military says the U.S. troops were targeting a man believed to be the leader of a bombing network in an area north of Baghdad.
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 More than 70,000 US-led soldiers are stationed in Afghanistan. |
"The governor of Chora district [in the southern province of Uruzgan] Rozi Khan and two of his men were shot dead late Wednesday as they were going to help a friend who believed Taliban fighters had surrounded his home," Uruzgan police commander Gulab Khan said Thursday.
"The men outside the friend's home were international forces, who in turn mistook Khan and his associates for Taliban attackers," Khan added.
Meanwhile, President Karzai expressed sorrow in a statement over the killing, and said the district chief had been his close associate.
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Key Witness to WTC 7 Explosions Dead at 53
Emergency coordinator and 9/11 witness Barry Jennings has passed away with controversy about WTC7 still hot– as the BBC hit piece and NIST report have been released to counter Jennings’ exclusive testimony of explosions inside Building 7
Aaron Dykes
Infowars.com
September 16, 2008
UPDATED SEPT 17 4:05 PM CST: NYC Housing Authority spokesman Howard Marder has now officially confirmed that Barry Jennings indeed passed away approximately a month ago after several days in the hospital, matching confirmations from several other employees at the Housing Authority. Marder commented that Jennings was a great man, well liked by everyone at the Housing Authority, and that he would be missed. No other details were available.
 | |
| |
| Barry Jennings– now dead at 53– details his eyewitness account while trapped inside WTC7 on 9/11 in a 2007 interview. Jennings told reporters on the day of 9/11, as well as Loose Change cameras in 2007, that he heard repeated explosions inside the building before either Tower 1 or Tower 2 collapsed and testified that he was "stepping over dead bodies" while exiting the ‘blown-out’ lobby to WTC7. | |
|
Barry Jennings, a key 9/11 eyewitness who was an emergency coordinator for the New York Housing Authority, has passed away at age 53 from circumstances not yet disclosed.
A spokesperson for the Housing Authority has now confirmed his death, after weeks of rumors circulating online, but refused to give any further details. Several other individuals at the Housing Authority also confirmed that they knew Barry Jennings, and that indeed he had passed away about a month ago. No other details were available.
This office has not yet been able to contact anyone in the Jennings family and the official cause of death is not yet known, but online comments have reported the date of death as August 19, 2008.
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Dahr Jamail
MARFA, Texas, Sep 16 (IPS) - Aside from the Iraqi people, nobody knows what the U.S. military is doing in Iraq better than the soldiers themselves. A new book gives readers vivid and detailed accounts of the devastation the U.S. occupation has brought to Iraq, in the soldiers' own words.
"Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupation," published by Haymarket Books Tuesday, is a gut-wrenching, historic chronicle of what the U.S. military has done to Iraq, as well as its own soldiers.Authored by Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and journalist Aaron Glantz, the book is a reader for hearings that took place in Silver Spring, Maryland between Mar. 13-16, 2008 at the National Labour College.
"I remember one woman walking by," said Jason Washburn, a corporal in the U.S. Marines who served three tours in Iraq. "She was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading toward us, so we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher, and when the dust settled, we realised that the bag was full of groceries. She had been trying to bring us food and we blew her to pieces."
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File Photo
“My wife is dying in childbirth, please allow us to cross!”
“… Where is your permit?”
“I am telling you my wife is dying, and you are asking me for a permit?”
This was part of the dialogue between Palestinian resident Moayyad Abu Reeda, 29, and a soldier at Huwwara military roadblock, south of Nablus, in the northern part of the West Bank, as he was trying to take his wife, who was in labor, to a hospital in Nablus.
Albanian witness in U.S. arms probe dies suddenly
By Benet KolekaFri Sep 12, 7:00 PM ET
Albania's government said on Friday it was looking into the sudden death of an arms industry figure who was helping prosecutors investigate a weapons sale to the United States and an explosion that killed 26 people.
Television pictures showed businessman Kosta Trebicka, his head covered in blood, sprawled on his back on a dirt road in a remote area of eastern Albania, where he had been hunting. His off-road car was nearby, and appeared to be damaged.
"We have identified the corpse of citizen Kosta Trebicka," Interior Minister Bujar Nishani told a late evening news conference. "We shall make public the conclusions of experts as soon as they reach them," he added.
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