Seven American soldiers killed in Afghanistan
Press TV – August 29, 2010
Separate Taliban attacks and bomb explosions have left seven American soldiers dead in Afghanistan’s most volatile regions, NATO has reported.
Three soldiers were killed while they were fighting militants in two separate battles in eastern parts of Afghanistan on Saturday, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a statement.
Two other soldiers lost their lives in an improvised bomb attack in the country’s south on the same day, while two more were killed in separate attacks in the south on Sunday, ISAF said.
The statements did not reveal the nationalities of the casualties but a military spokesman said that “all were Americans,” AFP reported.
The latest deaths bring the toll among the US-led forces in Afghanistan to 472 so far this year. The incidents come as the number of attacks against Western troops in Afghanistan has soared significantly in the past months amid a public outcry against the prolonged war.
Amnesty slams Canada for rights abuse
Press TV – August 24, 2010
Amnesty International’s new secretary general has sharply criticized the Canadian government for its “serious” human rights violations.
Salil Shetty told the CIVICUS World Assembly on Citizen Participation on Monday that Amnesty International is increasingly concerned “about the serious worsening” of Canada’s human rights approach.
“There is a real shrinking of democratic spaces in this country… Many organizations have lost their funding for raising inconvenient questions,” AFP quoted Shetty as saying. He also pressed Ottawa to seek the repatriation of a Canadian detainee, Omar Khadr, held at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Shetty said that the prisoner’s detention was “unlawful” and that his trial, held this month before a US military tribunal, was “unjust.”
Khadr was only 15 years old when he was captured by US troops in Afghanistan eight years ago. He is accused of throwing a grenade that killed an American soldier during a gun battle in 2002.
Khadr, who has spent one-third of his life in Guantanamo, says he was tortured while being interrogated and forced to provide false confessions.
In a sworn statement, the traumatized Canadian said he was beaten, subjected to long periods in solitary confinement, doused in freezing water, spat on, chained in painful positions, terrorized by barking dogs and subjected to sleep deprivation and threats of rape.
Colombian NGO accuses Uribe of treason
By Kirsten Begg | Colombia reports | August 19, 2010
Colombian NGO La Corporacion Colectivo de Abogados Jose Alvear Restrepo claims that former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s signing of a military pact with the U.S. was an act of treason, an abuse of power, and a breach of public duty.
The NGO announced that they will present the accusations before a Congress commission, following the Colombian Constitutional Court’s ruling on Tuesday that the pact Uribe signed in 2009 is unconstitutional until ratified by Congress.
According to the lawyers’ collective, the pact “compromises national sovereignty by ceding considerable portions of strategic territory, of airspace, maritime space, and the electromagnetic spectrum to the U.S., as well as granting them a set of unrestricted privileges not granted to the national population.”
The NGO alleges that Uribe, along with his Foreign Minister Jaime Bermudez, Defense Minister Gabriel Silva, and Interior and Justice Minister Fabio Valencia Cossio, compromised Colombia’s national sovereignty by “an arbitrary and unilateral act,” which constitutes abuse of authority and treason.
The NGO requested that the House of Representative’s Commission on Accusations and the prosecutor general investigate their allegations. It also called on current President Juan Manuel Santos to reconsider the base agreement “because of its damaging effects on Colombia’s diplomatic relations in the region, but above all because of its negative effect on national sovereignty and its impact on human rights and international humanitarian law.”
Following the Constitutional Court’s ruling, the pact must be ratified by Colombian House of Representatives.
Former commander of the Colombian armed forces General Freddy Padilla said Wednesday that U.S. Congress would need to ratify the pact if Colombia’s Congress did, and that the U.S. would not do so “due to their foreign policy circumstances.”
U.S. State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said Wednesday that Washington hopes Bogota “takes the necessary steps to preserve the bilateral military agreement,” and that in the meantime cooperation will continue under pre-existing agreements.
Santos said his government will study the agreement and “decide if it is worth continuing with the pact or not.”
According to Constitutional Court President Mauricio Gonzalez Cuervo, details such as “access points and the use of air bases, free movement within these installations, the freedom to carry arms” led the court to decide that the agreement was not simply an extension of previous treaties.
The controversial pact, which granted the U.S. access to at least seven Colombian military bases and civilian airports, was signed by U.S. President Barack Obama and Uribe in August 2009, but was never approved by the country’s Congress. According to Uribe, the pact was a continuation of existing policy and did not need congressional approval.
The agreement caused tensions in the region, as neighbors Ecuador and Venezuela consider U.S. military presence in Colombia a threat to their sovereignty.
The pact was also controversial within Colombia, with leftist opposition party Polo Democratico labelling the pact a violation of Colombian independence and sovereignty.
Hezbollah ruins Israeli drone contract
Press TV – August 16, 2010
Hezbollah’s recent revelation in airing photos taken by Israel’s unmanned surveillance planes has markedly affected the sale of the drones.
On August 9, Hezbollah Secretary General Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah said the Lebanese resistance movement had intercepted Israeli drone transmissions and used the intelligence in a deadly attack on Israeli commandos in the Lebanese coastal village of Antsaria back in 1997.
Nasrallah also presented footage taken by Israeli drones of routes taken by Lebanon’s slain Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri prior his assassination in February 2005, saying the video proved Israel’s involvement in the murder.
Citing a report by Jane’s Defense Weekly, al-Manar said the televised speech and the revelation has affected agreements between Tel Aviv and Moscow for purchasing Israeli surveillance drones.
Russian officials had reportedly launched talks with Israeli counterparts on a drone sale contract worth USD 300 million, but the Israeli side had to pull out of the negotiations due to security considerations.
Experts believe Hezbollah’s interception of the intelligence collected by the drones will affect the willingness of other countries such as Brazil, India and Turkey to purchase the spy aircraft.
Venezuela: Fifteen police officers sentenced for unionists’ deaths
WW4 Report | August 11, 2010
The Venezuelan Attorney General’s Office announced on August 2 that the Fourth Trial Court of the eastern state of Anzoategui had handed down prison sentences to 15 police agents for the January 29, 2009 shooting deaths of two unionists at the Mitsubishi Motors Corp (MMC) Automotriz auto factory in the Los Montones de Barcelona industrial park, located outside the city of Barcelona.
Five agents were sentenced to 12 years and nine months for voluntary homicide in the killing of Pedro Jesus Suarez Poito, a plant employee, and Javier Marcano, who worked at the Macusa auto parts factory, and for injuries to Alexander Garcia, a worker at the Barcelona plant. Ten agents received three-year prison terms for their involvement, and six were acquitted.
The same court sentenced police agent Juan Carlos Alvarez Rojas to 16 years and 10 months in prison last December for his part in the killings.
The killings took place when police tried to remove striking Mitsubishi workers who had occupied the Barcelona plant. Workers said they threw rocks and bottles at the police in response to the attempt to end the sit-in and that the police fired tear gas canisters and then shot at them. Company executives claimed that the workers were armed, but the announcement of the court’s decision didn’t mention any charges against the workers.
The leftist news site Laclase.info claims that an Anzoategui state official initially blamed the strikers for the confrontation and that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez implied at first that the workers were armed.
The site called the sentencing of the police agents “an important victory, although still incomplete,” pointing out that the judge who ordered the operation was not tried.
The site also called for an investigation of the role of Anzoategui Governor Tarek William Saab Halabi, a Chavez ally.
Israeli police raze rebuilt Bedouin village
AL-ARAQIB, Israel: Hundreds of Israeli police stormed an unrecognized Bedouin village Wednesday, less than one week after it was razed to make way for Jewish National Fund forest, witnesses said.
Residents, who remained in the Negev-area village to rebuild, said clashes erupted with police, sent to clear the Bedouin who had not left the area.
The dwellings were rebuilt following a decision by the Higher Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel, the online news site Arab48 reported. The decision was made following the demolition of the buildings on 27 July.
Witnesses said bulldozers tore down the new structures, prompting the clashes, in which five people sustained injuries, including Palestinian member of Israel’s Knesset Taleb As-Sana, as Israeli police tried to remove him from one of the sit-in tents.
Salem Abu Madeghem and Awad Abu Fareeh, field researchers for the civil rights group in Israel Adalah, as well as two others, sustained injuries, residents said, adding that all were transferred to hospital for treatment.
Spokesman for Israel’s police Mickey Rosenfeld said a number of shacks were taken down in the village, and noted several were taken in for questioning. Others, he added, were arrested “for causing disturbances at the scene and police are in and around the village at the moment to prevent further disturbances.”
The Islamic Movement in Israel’s chief Sheikh Mussa Abu Ayyad said his organization would stand by the Bedouin residents, who are all citizens of Israel, and would provide services for them.
Locals said they intended to return to their village to once again rebuild the homes.
On 27 July, all 40 homes in the Al-Araqib village were destroyed and 300 residents were evicted during the raid which began at 4:30 a.m. after the Israeli government deemed the village illegally built on state land. The Bedouin residents say they have proof of land ownership, and have been in court for several years.
Approximately 1,500 police officers participated including special riot forces, mounted officers, helicopters, and bulldozers.
At least 200 children were left homeless as a result, as police removed residents property into prepared containers, and bulldozers razed buildings and sheepfolds, local activists said in a statement. Fruit orchards and olive grove trees were destroyed in the process.
Israeli activists who were present at the demolition described the move as an “act of war, such as is undertaken against an enemy.”
South of the Border – Interview with Oliver Stone
Red Pepper | July 28, 2010
Oliver Stone’s new documentary ‘South of the Border’ chronicles the emergence of progressive governments in Latin America’s, their quest for social and political transformation and their growing independence from Washington. Roberto Navarrete interviews Oliver Stone and Tariq Ali (one of the film’s scriptwriters) to find out some background
RN: You have made three films on Latin America, two of them on Fidel Castro. What motivated you to make this new documentary about Latin America?
OS: Also don’t forget about ‘Salvador’ in 1986. That was about El Salvador, in Central America, which was a tragedy. So I went back, I like Latin America; I view South America as the underdog in this situation. As a moviemaker I tend to make movies about people who don’t get a fair shake. I think it’s wrong what’s going on. I met Chavez for the first time in 2007, then I went back in 2008 and he said don’t take my word for it, go and talk to my neighbours. I did. We met seven Presidents in six countries. I said, what’s all the fuss about? Why are we making such a stink about Chavez? There is something going wrong. When the United States gets so self-interested in destroying somebody, which has happened repeatedly in South America and Central America, there is some motivation. We are looking for that motivation.
RN: The mainstream US media has been rather critical about your film. Are you surprised about this?
OS: No, I’m surprised we were able to take it as far as we have. People will see the movie. There will be an uphill battle, because when the New York Times says don’t see this movie they are lobbying against it.
TA: That also has an opposite effect. A lot of people will say, the way these guys are writing about the movie means there is something fishy here. It encourages people to see it.
RN: It’s more worrying when the Village Voice is so negative.
OS: The Voice for years has been doing that. They are not a liberal organisation in my mind. I think that they are pseudo-liberals. You can get into a whole argument about what it is to be a liberal, or a progressive in America. It’s nitpicking. Nitpicking.
RN: So it’s like The Guardian here in relation to Venezuela?
TA: The Guardian correspondent in Venezuela lives in the leafy suburbs of eastern Caracas and his reporting from Venezuela is totally biased.
RN: You seem to be fascinated by the charisma of the Latin American ’caudillo’, leaders such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. But Latin America is also the birthplace of social movements that have for a long time been fighting for change. How do you see the dynamic relationship between the two, between the leaders on the one hand and the social movements on the other?
TA: These leaders would not be in power were it not for the social movements. There is a link between the two. The social movements in Bolivia helped create the Movement for Socialism, the party of Evo Morales that propelled him into power. The big social movements against the IMF in Venezuela that led to the massacre, the ‘Caracazo’, in which three thousand people were killed produced Chavez. The same movements occurred in Ecuador, in Paraguay. So I don’t see a big divide. Each depends on the other. This divide largely exists in the West where the social movements have died out because they weren’t able to achieve anything. There is hardly a social movement left now in Western Europe. A country like Italy, which had huge social movements – now all gone. Whereas, in South America, one reason they have lasted is because they have managed to achieve something, not a huge amount, but structural reforms to the system.
OS: I would add, not only do I like ‘caudillos’ or strong men, that’s not the same as a dictator, he [Chavez] has obviously been elected. I much admire Nestor Kirchner, an intellectual with volition to do something. Because intellectuals tend to get lost in their will power. Kirchner was strong enough to carry through a reform based on his thinking on economic reform. He is a shining example of a hero to me. He said, himself, in the documentary, my friend Hugo should consider a successor, because too much of one man will backfire and I think that is the problem that Hugo is going to face. He’s too much in the news. He is too controversial. They are making an argument about Hugo Chavez, instead of the argument about right versus left in Latin America.
Footnote
Roberto Navarrete is an editor of www.alborada.net, a website covering politics, media and culture in Latin America.
South of the Border is released in UK cinemas on Friday 30 July www.southoftheborder.dogwoof.com
The Tipping Point Film Fund will hold a screening of South of the Border (including a panel discussion entitled: Radical Latin American leadership – what’s to be afraid of?) on Friday 30 July at 6:30 PM (details here).
Be sure to see the movie.
Israel’s nuclear program implicated in U.S. investigation
By Yossi Melman | Haaretz | July 15, 2010
Israel’s nuclear program has been implicated in an investigation conducted in the United States by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), according to a report published on Wednesday by the researchers of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS).
The investigation began in spring 2010 when the BIS charged Pelogy, a U.S. based company and its Belgian affiliate, with violating U.S. export administration regulations by attempting to export controlled goods to Israel, India, China and South Africa.
According to the investigation, in the case of Israel and India, the goods could have been used to manufacture nuclear weapons and missile programs.
The charges followed a voluntary self-disclosure by the companies.
In the case of Israel, the BIS neither identified the equipment or components purchased in America nor the suspected purchaser of these goods. No further details have been provided about the case.
It is worth mentioning that in the 1980s, regardless of Jonathan Pollards’ espionage activities for Israel, Israeli companies and individuals were involved many cases of technological espionage, stealing U.S. secrets, technology and equipment.
The most outstanding case involved Milco, a U.S. based company owned by Israeli tycoon Arnon Milchan, which bought and shipped equipment with which could have also been used as triggers for nuclear weapons.
Salvadorian hit-man extradited to Cuba to answer hotel bombing charges
By Patrick J. O’Donoghue | VHeadline News | July 08, 2010
Venezuela has extradited Salvadorian hit-man, Francisco Chavez Abarca to Cuba where he is wanted for allegedly placing bombs in hotels to destabilize the tourism industry in 1997.
According to Venezuelan government reports and confirmed by Telesur, Chavez Abarca has been singing like a canary, confessing he had been hired to set up destabilizing activities in the run-up to the legislative elections in September.
The Salvadorian is said to be one of Cuban terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles’ henchmen or link-man with Venezuela.
The Venezuelan police have not revealed details about possible associates in the country only to confirm that the investigation into Chavez Abarca’s contacts continues. The Salvadorian tried to enter Venezuela last Thursday using false documents and a Guatemalan passport.
The suspect’s wife has accused the Venezuelan government of having kidnapped her husband in Guatemala and forcibly taken him to Venezuela.
Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro said terrorist bands operating inside Venezuela are being monitored and that Chavez Abarca is part of the group trained and financed by the CIA in Central America.
Letter to Noam Chomsky
Mark H. Gaffney – July 7, 2010
Dear Noam Chomsky,
By now, someone has probably forwarded David Ray Griffin’s letter on to you. But if not, see the link at bottom.
For what it’s worth, my own research supports Griffin on ALL points.
Having said this, I’m going to climb onto my high horse. I want you to know how disappointed I am in you. You have done something unworthy of yourself. You have buried your head in the sand on one of the crucial issues of our time.
Several years ago, when I first brought the evidence about 9/11 to your attention, you replied that the evidence needed to find its way into print in mainstream science or engineering journals. Later, after this happened, and I brought it to your attention, you responded by feigning ignorance. You said you were not qualified to evaluate the evidence.
Baloney. You copped out.
If a theologian like Griffin can examine the evidence (which today is much stronger) in a logical and rational manner, surely we should expect no less of the world’s leading linguistic scholar.
By the way, I am aware that, many years ago, competent individuals showed you the evidence about the JFK assassination. It was already strong, at that time. According to various reports, you responded in exactly the same manner. You whiffed. So, given this, your ducking on 9/11 is not so surprising.
I confess that for many years I was in denial myself about the Kennedy assassination. But I’ve learned that these two key issues go hand in hand. The crux of the problem is the national security state.
I wish I could say: I’m hopeful. But if a linguistic genius cannot decipher the writing on the wall, what chance is there for ordinary people?
Until and unless the peace movement joins forces with the 9/11 truth movement, we will never have the political clout to turn the tide, to borrow a line from one of your books.
Respectfully,
Mark H. Gaffney
Also see: Noam Chomsky – a fraud in linguistics and an double-agent
Recalling the ‘successful’ counterinsurgency
July 6, 2010 – Kuala Lumpur
Do we not care about the massacres of our lifetime?
December 1948 was just six months into a 12-year campaign to crush communists, who were trying to drive British occupiers out of the Malay Peninsula.
From 1874 to mid 1950s, the British struggled to suppress resistance to occupation. The brutality of some British forces in the Malay Peninsula drove many ethnic Chinese to communism. People who supported communists were literally fenced in. People who opposed communism were co-opted and their communities offered food, medicine and protection. The guerrillas were starved out in the jungle with the gorillas.
Survivors recall
“Did the soldiers bring you outside all at once or in groups?”
“I cannot remember, I fainted. The spirits pushed me. They shot us.”
He was not well in his 70s. He went to the spot where he fainted and fell from British bullets that killed 24 of his fellow workers 55 years before. The rubber trees these deceased tapped were felled long ago. Only stumps remain of the “rumah kongsi” that was once their communal home. His wife had throat cancer. She could eat only un-spiced fish and vegetables. She remembered the brutalities. She was 16 then, a fiance to the man. Another survivor, in her 80s, could recall seeing her husband, the estate supervisor, led out and shot in cold blood with the others.
“The British said that the man who had a receipt for fruit was supplying communists with food. ” “They shot him.” “I wanted to stay and die with them.”
“So cruel those British, so cruel.”
The British soldiers came in trucks and accused the villagers of helping communists. The men and women of the village were separated. The women were loaded onto trucks to be taken away. The younger woman asked where the men were. The soldiers said the men would have to be shot. She remembered watching as the men were led out in groups of four and five, told to turn around by the waiting troops and shot in the back. After two days, she returned to look for her fiance. The bodies had been mutilated, heads hacked off and genitals smashed.
This was 8 months after the massacre of 250 Palestinians on 9th April, 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin in the district of Jerusalem in British-occupied Palestine. The soldiers who made Batang Kali into a killing field in December 1948 were not illegal illegitimate immigrant thugs of the Haganah, Vladimir Jabutinsky’s Irgon, Abraham Stern’s the Stern gang, Palmach and Golani supported and funded by Anglo-American Zionists in the premeditated and systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. They were British Scots Guards struggling to hold on to imperialism, colonialism and may be even Zionism in the face of widespread resentment and resistance. This killing field in the Malay Peninsular as brutal as the Sharpeville massacre of 69 young demonstrators in apartheid South Africa in March 1960 was not unlike so many killing fields made by Americans up north in late 1960s. It was worse with the massacre of 150 unarmed Vietnamese at My Lai on 16th March 1968. It was so much worse with the massacre of at least 1000 unarmed Palestinian refugees in September 1982 at Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon ordered by Ariel Sharon as Israeli defense minister conspiring with Elie Hobeike’s Lebanese Forces militia, and another Israeli proxy, Major Saad Haddad’s South Lebanon Army after the American-backed invasion of West Beirut.
Justice was never seen to have been done about these massacres and many more. The killers are still at it in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan.
Are we not weaklings held to account for indifference or inaction?
These, our deceased, had the right of resistance; they might be labeled communists or terrorists, but they were our people, dead or alive; anytime anywhere they were braver than those people who shot them in the back.
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Clash of Civilization, Iran Part II
By Jamal Kanj – Intifada-Palestine.com – January 14, 2011
Israel’s survival kit is: perpetuate conflict, insecurity to rationalize collective hate and finally playing victim.
Devoid of conflict, Israel implodes internally; without hate, Zionism loses its justification; and playing eternal victim to continue blackmailing the West. Absence of this holy trinity, Israel ceases to exist.
From its inception, the house of Zion has mastered exploiting adversarial powers to advance Israel’s cause. For instance, their influence over the Democratic Party in the US began with President Truman’s bid for 2nd term election in 1948.
Responding to strong opposition from Secretary of State General George Marshall and Department experts urging against recognition of Israel, President Truman replied: “I’m sorry gentlemen but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands [Jewish voters] who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of [voting] Arabs among my constituents”
Zionists influence over liberal American politics was matched with the doctrinal school of Conservative theoreticians aligning the Republican Party’s platform with Israel’s objectives. The Neoconservative Zionists, coined Zioncons, invented the “Clash of Civilization” concept to fight Israel’s wars. … continue
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