Free Iraq

Bottom line: We're not leaving - voluntarily.
 

(Would the truth - or another perspective - kill us?)
Al-Jazeera, as American as Apple Pie: ... al-Jazeera is a pioneer of news independence that the U.S. government once lauded for bringing freedom of the press to the Middle East. Now it's planning to broadcast worldwide, including in the United States. But as its Arab owners work to make that a reality, the prejudice here persists, and those of us who work for the network find ourselves running, at every turn, into resistance, rejection and racism.

Most people in [the U.S.] have never watched al-Jazeera. But in so many minds, it has become synonymous with al-Qaeda. I'd guess that the only thing most people know about it is that it is always the first network to receive bin Laden's videotapes. What they don't know is that al-Jazeera started nearly 10 years ago as the first independent voice in the Middle East. With the courage to tell it like it is, it offended authoritarian regimes from Saudi Arabia to Jordan. Its reporters -- and at times the network itself -- have been routinely kicked out of countries for reporting the real news instead of acting like the sleeping pill known as state-run television news.

What many Americans also don't know is that, before Sept. 11, 2001, al-Jazeera was lauded and applauded by the Bush administration for this fearless attitude toward the dictatorships of the Middle East. High-ranking administration officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, made frequent appearances on the network.

The White House now takes every opportunity to demonize the network's editorial choices. Some of these choices may be hard for Americans to stomach. But they undeniably offer another side of the story. And al-Jazeera has a tradition of showing both sides. Many Americans would probably be surprised to learn that last winter, a fiery Syrian American psychiatrist, Wafa Sultan, came out on al-Jazeera to declare that violence is destroying Islam. The impassioned interview made her an international sensation -- and a target of death threats.

... [T]he United States needs an outlet like al-Jazeera International, offering a wider panorama of views. These are dangerous times. And they will just get more dangerous if each side continues to retreat. Al-Jazeera doesn't shy away from any side of a story. And Americans should not shy away from al-Jazeera.
 

Palestine News Network, Ministry of Health report on toxic Israeli weapons confirmed by Gaza City medical sources: Dr. Al Sakka told Voice of Palestine Radio that the Israeli army is using new types of non-conventional weapons against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during the recent attacks. He said, “They are targeting the Palestinian body with unconventional weapons and with that comes a phenomena we have not seen before in any Israeli bombardment we have lived through for many years.”

He continued, “The hospital is central and sees almost all cases of injuries and deaths as a result of Israeli against the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip. These Israeli bombings are entering the body and fragmenting, causing internal combustion leading to up to fourth degree internal burns, exposing the bone, and affecting the tissue and skin.”

The doctor added, “These tissues die, they do not survive, which obliges us to perform arm or leg amputations, and there are fragments which penetrate the body and do not show up on X-rays. When entering the body they spark like a combustion firearm, but not chemically. They seem radioactive.”

He confirmed that there were dozens of wounded legs and arms. Many of them had been burned from the inside, and distorted to the point that they cannot return to life again.

Dr. Al Sakka revealed that the Israelis completely destroyed by the lab which would help in diagnosing such cases. “We no longer have the ability to make these examinations on phenomena that we see is not normal.”

He called on the international community to examine the latest weapons however the doctor reported that “no one has lifted a finger.” Dr. Al Sakka complained that he did not see any foreign medical institution interested in the use of new weapons and their affects on the human body. He said, “What we found were journalists who came to take pictures, but as for the medical community, nothing.”
 

Video (4 min), The Miami Seven: Jon Stewart [Yes, the Jon Stewart!!!] takes a look at the case known to many as "The Miami Seven." He examines the careful and decisive evidence told to us by Alberto Gonzales. (. . . demonstrating, yet again, why here in the U.S. I rely on the Comedy Channel for news and views.)
 

Kurt Nimmo, David Horowitz: Kill More Arabs: David Horowitz, former Marxist gone to neocon seed, salivating over a possible war in the Middle East, writes: “Americans need to take a hard look at what is going on in the Middle East, because it provides the clearest picture possible of the war we are in. The war reveals the impossibility of a Palestinian state and the necessity of a civilized occupying force in a region that is populated by a people who have been terminally brainwashed into an ideology of hate, which makes their self-government a crime waiting to happen.”

Civilized—you know, like bombing families with twelve children while they sleep. It is an odd civilization that bombs residential neighborhoods, resulting in dead babies “sliced into three” and “body parts hung from olive trees,” as Jihad Siqlawi reports (no, not for the New York Times, but for Agence France-Presse).

Horowitz wants the United States to join in on the brutal and illegal attack against the people of Lebanon, sort of a continuation of Iraq, a “war” even Philip Zelikow, Bush advisor, admitted was launched in Israel’s name.

Golda Meir simply refused to acknowledge the Palestinians. However, the group of Israelis supported by Horowitz are determined to kill them—that is if the Palestinians cannot summon up the required humility to grovel and beg for their lives, plead for a place at the table, or rather beneath the table, where the dogs fight for the master’s scraps.

Israel has the sort of democracy practiced in Alabama, circa 1920, or maybe South Africa. No, Israel is far worse than South Africa, as the latter did not habitually attack Tswanaland or Bushmanland the way the former attacks Gaza and the West Bank. (emphasis added)
 

Kurt Nimmo, Corporate Media Faithfully Spins Lebanese Mass Murder: If you watch CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, etc., ad nauseam, and you are a retard when it comes to real history (in this sense, most Americans are retards), you will believe the disgusting lie that poor little “democratic” Israel is simply responding to Arab terrorism when it kills 60 or more civilians in Lebanon, targets civilian infrastructure, bombs roads and bridges, thus trapping frightened residents in towns where they can expect to share the fate of the Palestinians, who are under siege for the sin of demanding Israel stop treating them as “drugged cockroaches” and “beasts on two legs,” as Israeli leaders have called them. ...
 

Robert Fisk, From my home, I saw what the 'war on terror' meant: All night I heard the jets, whispering high above the Mediterranean. It lasted for hours, little fireflies that were watching Beirut, waiting for dawn perhaps, because it was then that they descended.

They came first to the little village of Dweir near Nabatiya in southern Lebanon where an Israeli plane dropped a bomb on to the home of a Shia Muslim cleric. He was killed. So was his wife. So were eight of his children. One was decapitated. All they could find of a baby was its head and torso which a young villager brandished in fury in front of the cameras. Then the planes visited another home in Dweir and disposed of a family of seven.

It was a brisk start to Day Two of Israel's latest "war on terror" ...
 

Mona El-Farra, My life in Gaza: THE IRONY IS almost beyond belief. Since the capture of an Israeli soldier on June 25, the Gaza Strip has been subjected to a large-scale military operation, what Israel calls ``Summer Rain." Because Israel bombed the power plant, and the area needs electricity to pump water, most of Gaza now has almost no access to drinking water. In the heat of summer, rain would be a blessing far more welcome than the ongoing bombings.

I am already starting to lose track of days and nights, of how many bombs have dropped. Since the main power plant was destroyed, we have had to live with no electricity. What we do get is patchy, and barely enough to recharge our mobile phones and our laptops so that we do not lose all touch with each other and with the outside world.

As a physician, I fear for our patients. Twenty-two hospitals have no electricity. ...

Food too is spoiling without refrigeration, and food supplies are low. West Bank farmers threw away truckloads of spoiled fruit after sitting for days and then being denied Israeli permission to enter Gaza. Children grow hungry as we watch the food that could nourish them thrown into the garbage instead. More than 30,000 children suffer from malnutrition, and this number will increase as diarrhea spreads because of the limited supply of clean water and food contamination.
 

Gilad Atzmon, Pour out your fury upon the people of Lebanon and Gaza: Israel is a racially orientated democracy. Its leaders are engaged in one thing only, i.e. maintenance of the their political power. As far as the Israeli political game is concerned, the rule is very simple, the more Arab blood you have on your hands the more you are suited to get on with your governing job. This rule obviously was in favour of Rabin, Sharon, Barak and Netanyahu. Olmert and Peretz are still quite far behind. Both the prime minister and his defence minister lack some real experience in military and security matters. Hence they have a lot of catching up to do.

In other words, Peretz and Olmert have to provide the Israeli people with a glorious spectacle of merciless retaliation. They have to prove to their keen voters that they have internalised the real biblical meaning of ‘an eye for an eye’. Looking at the carnage in Beirut today it somehow seems as if they even try to give the old Hebraic say a new meaning. As devastating as it may sound, this is exactly what the Israelis want them to do. Within democratic Israel the biblical call "pour out your fury upon the goyim” is translated into a Jewish secular pragmatic political practice. This isn’t sad. This is a real tragedy. And I wonder whether there is anyone out there who is still overwhelmed with the Israeli unilateral peace agenda?
 

Ramzy Baroud, Racism Plagues Western Media Coverage: Racism is "the belief that one 'racial group' is inferior to another and the practices of the dominant group to maintain the inferior position of the dominated group. Often defined as a combination of power, prejudice and discrimination."

Only racism can completely remove from the current discourse the murder of dozens of Palestinian civilians at the hands of the Israeli Army (90 civilians in seven weeks) as the reason that led to the Palestinian raid on the Israeli Army post and the capture of Shalit, and instead depict the current escalation as if it was entirely the work of the Palestinians, with Israel's slate still clean.
 

Remi Kanazi, Palestinians have a legitimate right to defend themselves against this illegal occupation
 

Stephen Lendman, It's Time to End the "Last Taboo" and Hold Israel Accountable for Its Actions
 

Iraqi Olympic chief kidnapped in Baghdad: The security guards ... were no match for the attackers, who killed two guards and wounded four in the attack.

The brazen operation raised questions about whether the raid was officially sanctioned.
 

(Our cowboy out meetin 'n greetin)
Bush, Italy PM discuss world tension -- and World Cup win
 

Meanwhile . . .
xymphora, The suicide parade: It’s funny how assassinations tend to occur in clusters. We have recently seen the obvious assassination of Philip Merrill, likely related to what he knew about billions of dollars stolen in Iraq. Now we have the odd ‘suicide’ – by shotgun, again, along with killing the twelve-year-old autistic son to whom he was devoted - of William H. Lash III. Lash had the same type of information as Merrill ...

Someone is making sure that there is no one left alive to disclose the names of the guilty. Look for a few more ‘suicides’ and ‘accidents’ before this is done.
 

Kurt Nimmo, Israel Prepares to Invade Syria
 

Chris Floyd, Serpent's Egg: Hundreds, possibly thousands of neo-Nazis and "white power" extremists have infiltrated U.S. forces in a deliberate strategy to get training in weapons, urban warfare and covert operations, the Pentagon's own investigators report. These homegrown terrorists -- avowed enemies of democracy, committed to sparking the same kind of horrific civil war in America that President George W. Bush has spawned in Iraq -- have wormed their way into some of most elite military units, as well as filling up the ordinary ranks with cretinous "race warriors."

This infestation is being actively abetted by the Bush regime. ...

In its heedless lust for loot and dominion, the Bush faction will use anyone: neo-Nazis, neoconservatives, theocrats, dictators, death squads, nutballs. The blowback from nest of vipers will poison American life for generations ...
 

Imad

Sad and tragic to say, BUT,

It does appear that ALL of King George's horses and all of King George's men, couldn't put Iraqi Dumpty, together again.
:-)