 | AFGHANISTAN: This war of lies goes on: There is no victory in Afghanistan's tribal war, only the exchange of one group of killers for another. The difference is that President Bush calls the latest occupiers of Kabul "our friends". |
| UNITED STATES: America's terrorist training camp: George Bush has said that anyone who "houses and supports terrorists" is themselves a terrorist — so maybe people should take a look in the US president's own backyard to find one. |
| UNITED STATES: Another contra scandal?: During the 1980s, the Reagan administration became mired in the Iran-contra scandal.....Last year, Israeli arms dealers bought 3000 assault rifles and ammunition from the Nicaraguan security forces and covertly sold them to Colombia's counter-revolutionaries (contras), the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). |
| ISRAEL: Apartheid marriage act passed: On July 31, Israel's Knesset (parliament) overwhelmingly passed an apartheid-like marriage law. The law forbids Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens from obtaining Israeli citizenship or permits to live with their spouses and children in Israel. |
| IRAQ: Arab masses' anger disrupts US countdown to war: The US and British governments' carefully scripted countdown to a massive military attack on Iraq is being disrupted — possibly delayed — by mounting popular anger throughout the Middle East provoked by Israel's murderous escalation of its war on the Palestinian people. |
| Arafat and terrorism: Bush has said that Israel has the right to "defend" itself against "terrorists", and promoted the myth that Arafat hasn't condemned suicide bombings — at least "in Arabic". Bush appears to have great difficulty with the English language, so it should be no surprise that his grasp of Arabic is less than profound. |
| UNITED STATES: Bush forest fire plan: log it all: In the name of fire prevention, Bush wants to okay the timber industry to log more than one million hectares of federal forest over the next 10 years. He wants it done quickly and without any interference from pesky statutes such as the Endangered Species Act. |
| UNITED STATES: Bush gang threatens war against `40 to 50' countries: .... Cheered by having replaced Afghanistan's bad terrorists with America's good terrorists, the US defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has asked the Pentagon to “think the unthinkable”, having rejected its “post-Afghanistan options” as “not radical enough”. |
| CUBA: `End barbarity against Palestinian people': In the face of the barbaric acts unleashed in Palestine with the invasion by Israeli troops, under the command of Ariel Sharon, I am asking that, with the greatest urgency, make everything possible under your reach to put an immediate end to the aggression and to promote the effective solidarity with the Palestinian people. |
| UNITED STATES: Hail to the thief: ...Today, the idea that Bush could be an aggressive cop on the corporate crime beat is about as believable as the idea that he got into Yale because of his sharp intellect. It's not just that Bush has packed his administration with officials who have their own records as corporate hucksters. Bush himself owes his fortune to a string of insider deals. |
| PALESTINE: How Israel creates suicide bombers: ...The cruelty of the occupation has been sharply condemned by international and Israeli human rights groups for many years. The purpose of Israel's state terror, economic strangulation and daily humiliation is not obscure. It was articulated in the early years of the occupation by Moshe Dayan, one of Israel's leaders most sympathetic to the Palestinian plight, who advised his Labor Party associates to tell the Palestinians that "you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave". ... |
| PALESTINE: Israeli colonialism is cause of violence: On April 10, eight Israelis died and 19 were wounded in a suicide bomb detonation on a bus traveling from Haifa to Jerusalem. Reports indicate that most of the victims of the blast were soldiers from the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). What would make a person blow themselves up in order to kill a handful of soldiers? |
| ISRAEL: Divisions grow over war: Israeli society is becoming increasingly polarized. On one side there are those who have lost, or are losing, faith in a military strategy to crush the current Intifada, and who are beginning to understand that without justice for Palestinians there will be no peace. On the other, there are those, including Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who advocates an escalation of the war against the Palestinian people. |
| Israel massacres Palestinian refugees: The refugee camp, located near the city of Jenin in the north of the West Bank, housed descendants of Palestinians evicted from their land near Haifa in 1948 by Zionist militias. It was densely packed, with 15,000 residents — 50% of them children — living in an area of around one square kilometer. The camp barely exists today. For nine days, beginning on April 5, thousands of Israeli soldiers, supported by tanks, helicopter gunships and F16 warplanes, systematically bombarded the area with the clear aim of killing residents and razing the camp. |
| ISRAEL: Policy of collective punishment is torture: Following the deaths of four Israeli soldiers on January 9 at the hands of members of the terrorist organization Hamas, tanks and bulldozers of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) began to destroy Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah. According to Amnesty International, “Six hundred people, most of them children, were left homeless in this raid against quarters that had no relationship with the attack on the military post.” |
| PALESTINE: Israeli military targets civilians: On July, 23 2003, a US-supplied Israeli F-16 warplane dropped a 1000-kilogram bomb on an apartment block in Gaza City. The bomb killed 15 civilians, including nine children along with Hamas leader Saleh Shehade. Eleven of those killed were in neighboring buildings. More than 140 Palestinians were injured. The bombing was hailed by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a "great success". |
| PALESTINE: The reality of Israel's `generous offer': The myth of the "generous offer" consisted of four enclaves, bisected by illegally built colonial settlements and bypass roads for Jews only, that would have prevented the Palestinians from ever establishing a viable, independent and contiguous state in any area between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. |
| PALESTINE: Israeli occupation leads to poverty, malnutrition: The study found a combined moderate and acute malnutrition rate of 9.3% for children aged from 6 months to 59 months in the Occupied Territories — "considered an emergency by most humanitarians and public health officials", according to the report. In a healthy population, the figure would be 2.28% or less. The figure for the Gaza Strip is particularly stark: 13.2%. |
| Israeli settlements: Frontline of the occupation: Eighty-eight percent of renewable water resources in the Occupied Territories are reserved for the use of Israelis — primarily the settlers. Palestinians are not allowed to dig agricultural wells, while settlers are allowed to dig at will. Per capita consumption of water by settlers is almost six times higher than that of Palestinians within the Occupied Territories. |
| AFGHANISTAN: More evidence of US crimes: We painstakingly assess the potential for injuring civilians or damaging civilian facilities, and positively identify targets before striking”, Colonel Ray Shepherd, a spokesperson for the US Central Command, told the July 21 New York Times. However, the US military's “painstaking” approach doesn't extend to identifying the number of civilians it has killed. |
| AFGHANISTAN: Report exposes continuing human rights abuses: The overall impact of human rights abuses in Afghanistan is starkly obvious. A climate of terror prevails in a country which has already suffered immensely. Washington's promise of security for Afghan men, women and children remains a distant dream. So does the country's reconstruction |
| PALESTINE: The myth of the empty land: Even after the majority of Palestinians had been expelled, Israel's prime minister, Golda Meir, declared in 1969, "It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist." |
| BRITAIN: `Not in our name': On April 4 2003, US President George Bush called on Israel to withdraw from the Palestinian cities occupied by its forces during the previous week. He excused Israel's violence, but lectured the Palestinians and the rest of the Middle East on the need for restraint and a lasting peace. "The storms of violence cannot go on", said Bush. "Enough is enough." What he neglected to say was that he needs a lull in the present crisis to lay his own war plans; that while he talks of peace in the Middle East, he is secretly planning a massive attack on Iraq. |
| PALESTINE: Operation 'Determined Path' to massacre: Bush's speech called for a "new and different Palestinian leadership, so that a Palestinian state can be born" (translation: Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat must be replaced by a leadership more consistently subservient to US and Israeli interests). The US president said that "the Palestinian people live in economic stagnation, made worse by official corruption" (which is quite something coming from the "Enron president"). |
| UNITED STATES: Should we blame the `Israel lobby'?: ...The US government — for its own imperial reasons — decides how much leeway Israel has. This leeway defines how successful the "Israel lobby" will be. As long as Israel remains central to US imperialism in the Middle East, Israel will continue to receive US backing and aid. That's why Israel's ace in the hole in Washington isn't AIPAC — but the Pentagon, the CIA and the capitalist politicians. |
| PALESTINE: The immortal heroes of Jenin: In the small refugee camp near Jenin, a group of Palestinian fighters from all the organizations gathered for a battle of defense that will be enshrined forever in the hearts of all Arabs. This is the Palestinian Massada — as an Israeli officer called it, alluding to the legendary stand of the remnants of the great Jewish rebellion against Rome in the year 71 AD. |
| PALESTINE: Toward submission or war?: The ruling circles in Israel, and the editorial pages of Israeli newspapers, discuss these questions with remarkable frankness. Views sympathetic to the Palestinian uprising for freedom and against occupation are rarely heard. Instead, the questions swirling around the future of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship are framed in terms of immediate Israeli interests: who will be the most compliant Palestinian leader? |
| VENEZUELA: US role in coup exposed: ...“Under the cover of ... training exercises in the Caribbean, the US Navy [USN] provided signals intelligence and communications jamming support to the Venezuelan military... From eastern Colombia, CIA and US contract military personnel, ostensibly used for counter-narcotics operations, stood by to provide logistics support for the leading members of the coup... |
| VENEZUELA: Uprising defeats US-backed coup: The simple slogan on a wall in Caracas explained it all: “Yankee, game over. You lost”. Within the space of 48 hours, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was overthrown by a military coup, only to be swept back to power by an uprising of the Venezuelan people. |
| AFGHANISTAN: Washington approved Taliban escape: ...Throughout the siege — which ended on November 25 when the Taliban surrendered and the Northern Alliance took control — there were persistent reports from villagers and Northern Alliance commanders of mysterious comings and goings of heavy aircraft at the Kunduz airport, mostly after dark. The November 24 New York Times reported that several flights were departing each day and lines of foreigners waiting to board aircraft had been observed by villagers. ... |
| IRAQ: Washington's oil grab: ...The ultimate prize in Iraq is oil, and the Bush-Cheney gang has uncoiled a vastly under-reported legal and financial cord that plugs US corporate control into these resources. The basic wiring has three prongs and is already complete... |
| Who is Ariel Sharon?: The brutality of the Israeli government toward Palestinians should be no surprise to anyone aware of the background of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. ... joined the Haganah, which fought in the “war of liberation” in 1948 — the original Israeli dispossession of Palestinians. In 1953 he led Unit 101, a commando group which committed numerous atrocities — one of the most notorious was the massacre of 69 civilians, including children, in the West Bank village of Qibya. ... |
| PALESTINE: World's longest running injustice: ...What we saw there is perhaps the longest running injustice in the world. Volumes of UN resolutions attest to this injustice, but still the occupying Israeli army acts with impunity — killing or arresting people or stealing more land, on a daily basis. We saw Palestinians having to line up at the checkpoints every day to go to work in another town or city; often they are turned back without reason. Checkpoints are everywhere throughout the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. ... |
| Palestine, the new Intifada: The call for war is strange. How have the masses reached such a point? The answer is easy: Following a decade of so-called peace, they have become convinced that only a war can relieve their misery.... but this time the will of the Palestinian street intersects with that of the Arab masses. |
| Palestine, why the US backs Israel: .....the United States, felt it could not vote against a United Nations Human Rights Commission resolution condemning Israel for “excessive” use of force. ...The state of Israel has been supported by US imperialism from its founding. It could hardly be otherwise. |
| The US backs apartheid Israel: The United States government's threat to boycott the UN-organized World Conference Against Racism, being held in South Africa from August 31, raises the question why the self-proclaimed “land of the free” would want to avoid a discussion about racism. ...... From the beginning Israel has had the political, economic and military backing of the US, along with other imperialist powers. |
| Palestine, to die surrendering or to die resisting? ...... Israel's aim was to break the spirit of the Palestinian people. Israel's Prime Minister (then Ehud Barak, but what is the difference? they're all the same) announced that this was only a token of what the Palestinians can expect. ...... Not only were they asked to give more concessions than they could reasonably give, but the reality was finally revealed: the peace process is a process of selling out the Palestinian people. |
| The PA kills 3 Palestinians protesting against the US war on Afghanistan: .........The most significant sign of this occurred in Gaza on October 9, when PA security forces opened fire with live ammunition and tear gas on a 5000-strong demonstration opposing the US-led attacks on Afghanistan. Three demonstrators were killed, including a 13-year old boy and 47 people were wounded. |
| Justification of war: ....... Because the US government has used the deaths of innocent civilians in New York and Washington to justify its war, it can't maintain public support if a large number of innocent Afghan civilians are known to have been killed by US bombs. |
| Bush gives the green light for Israeli attacks on the Palestinians: ......... Israel's military response was given the green light by Bush when he met with Sharon at short notice on December 3. The previously planned press conference that was to follow the meeting was cancelled so as to avoid Bush having to comment on Israel's response to the suicide bombings |
| Israel, a successful terrorism story: ........... If there was an Academy Awards ceremony for terrorism, Israel would sweep every category — and every acceptance speech would have to thank the government of The United States, whose generous support has made Israel the most successful terrorist state in the world. |
| United States: Lies, spies and dirty tricks: ........ The top US military brass, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wanted a war — but they didn’t have popular support for military action. Their solution? Stage an attack on an American military base, followed by a series of bombings and shootings that could be blamed on terrorist opponents of the US |
| Afghanistan: more death than September 11: ........ Memories of former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright's callous 1996 declaration that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to US-sponsored sanctions were “on balance ... worth it” were evoked on January 8 when the US envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, touched down in Kabul |
| Palestine: The myth of the empty land: ......... The state of Israel was founded on a lie: that Palestine was an empty land. “Land without people for a people with no land” was the Zionists' slogan. |
| Afghanistan: why Washington needs evil Elvis? ........ Despite the Taliban's clear military defeat — made total by the capture of the notorious Tora Bora caves in eastern Afghanistan in mid-December and the surrender of several hundred Taliban hold-outs in Helmand province — Washington continues to refuse to pronounce victory because Omar, 20 or so of his lieutenants, and bin Laden have not been caught or killed. |
| The Middle East: The big threat is Israel, not Iraq: The distraction, however, is vital. The only weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East are in Israel, a US protectorate. What is not being reported is that, as Israel's hawks fail to put down the Palestinian uprising, their leader, Ariel Sharon, may well remove the country's nuclear arsenal from its nominal strategy of “last resort”. |
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