Reaction to Wikileaks in Iraq
28 October, 2010 — The Real News Network
Sahar Issa: Iraqis scoff at notion that only 100,000 civilians died in war
28 October, 2010 — The Real News Network
Sahar Issa: Iraqis scoff at notion that only 100,000 civilians died in war
25 October, 2010 — Global Research
The Russian and Chinese need for a strategic Iranian partner is a component of any defensive strategy or viable alternative against American and European Union encroachment into their geopolitical spheres of interest.
In 2009, the Russian and Chinese need for having a government in power in Tehran that would be allied to them became apparent during the 2009 period of post-election restlessness in Iran. Moscow, Beijing, and many other capitals worldwide all kept close eyes on Iran when riots and protests spilled into Iranian streets.
The “Green Wave” or Green Revolution pertains to the riots by a segment of the opposition after Iran’s 2009 presidential elections. The movement gets its name from the colour of the Iranian flag that presidential candidate Mir-Hussein Mousavi selected. This event could have become a geo-political coup against the political entity of Eurasia. It very well could have become a bona fide geo-political threat to the interests of Russia and China. Inversely, the Green Wave was welcomed by America, Britain, France, Germany, Israel and their allies.
Gilad Atzmon & Nizar Al-Issa perform Baghdad at Cultures of Resistance Jul 07
Gilad Atzmon & Nizar Al-Issa Cultures of Resist…
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Hebrew speaking Palestinian-as he often refers about himself-Gilad Atzmon and the opening song from his album Exile..very powerfull
Sarah Gillespie and Gilad Atzmon Jazz FM live session with Bob Sinfield 7th Nov 09
1st collector for Sarah Gillespie and Gilad Atzmon Live on Jazz FM
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27 October, 2010 — IPS
Wikileaks Paints Grim Picture of Iraqi Civilian Casualties
William Fisher
NEW YORK, Oct 25 – Two revelations await the reader of the Wikileaks section dealing with civilian deaths in the Iraq War: Iraqis are responsible for most of these deaths, and the number of total civilian casualties is substantially higher than has been previously reported.
Leaked Report, New Iraqi Alignment Reveal U.S. War Failure
Analysis by Gareth Porter*
WASHINGTON, Oct 25 – A newly released Wikileaks document on Iraq and the new political alignment between Moqtada al-Sadr and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki both provide fresh evidence that Gen. David Petraeus’s war against Shi’a militias in 2007-2008 was a futile exercise.
More Iraqi Prison Abuses Exposed on Wikileaks
William Fisher
NEW YORK, Oct 24 – The publication of a motherlode of secret field reports from the Iraq War are shining a bright light on heretofore unknown or underreported suspicions about the power of private security contractors and the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by their fellow Iraqis, often with their U.S. military counterparts “turning a blind eye”.
MIDEAST: Treasure House Under Threat
Eva Bartlett
GAZA CITY, Oct 22 – Few outside of Gaza would consider its history much beyond the decades of Israeli occupation. But Gaza is a historical treasure house. Many of those treasures are now in Israeli museums, and those that remain are becoming difficult to preserve due to the Israeli siege.
EGYPT: Gag Tightens on Media Ahead of Elections
Cam McGrath
CAIRO, Oct 20 – Media watchdogs see the “invisible hand” of the ruling party behind a string of firings and resignations that have removed some of Egypt’s most prominent government critics from their soapboxes just weeks before parliamentary elections.
MIDEAST: This Peaceful Position Takes Courage
Mel Frykberg
EAST JERUSALEM, Oct 20 – A former captain in the Israeli Air Force, previously an ardent Zionist who lost many members of his family in the Holocaust, has been labelled a psychopath and denounced by many Israelis for the moral stand he has taken against the Israeli occupation.
This video is not for people to have a political debate on, when the people of the world see the wolf killing the baby in the living room, Palestine will be Free.
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27 October, 2010
Ken O’Keefe on the Mavi Marmara from pentos films on Vimeo. An adorable man tells his story.
Ken O’Keefe on the Mavi Marmara from pentos films on Vimeo.
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26 October, 2010 — ZCommunications
Part 1 |
For her recent talk on Kashmir writer Arundhati Roy has come under threat of “sedition” charges in India. These speeches are currently being analyzed by Delhi police.
Her response to the threat is below and was issued from Srinagar.
I write this from Srinagar, Kashmir. This morning’s papers say that I may be arrested on charges of sedition for what I have said at recent public meetings on Kashmir. I said what millions of people here say every day. I said what I, as well as other commentators have written and said for years. Anybody who cares to read the transcripts of my speeches will see that they were fundamentally a call for justice. I spoke about justice for the people of Kashmir who live under one of the most brutal military occupations in the world; for Kashmiri Pandits who live out the tragedy of having been driven out of their homeland; for Dalit soldiers killed in Kashmir whose graves I visited on garbage heaps in their villages in Cuddalore; for the Indian poor who pay the price of this occupation in material ways and who are now learning to live in the terror of what is becoming a police state.
Yesterday I traveled to Shopian, the apple-town in South Kashmir which had remained closed for 47 days last year in protest against the brutal rape and murder of Asiya and Nilofer, the young women whose bodies were found in a shallow stream near their homes and whose murderers have still not been brought to justice. I met Shakeel, who is Nilofer’s husband and Asiya’s brother. We sat in a circle of people crazed with grief and anger who had lost hope that they would ever get ‘insaf’—justice—from India, and now believed that Azadi—freedom— was their only hope. I met young stone pelters who had been shot through their eyes. I traveled with a young man who told me how three of his friends, teenagers in Anantnag district, had been taken into custody and had their finger-nails pulled out as punishment for throwing stones.
In the papers some have accused me of giving ‘hate-speeches’, of wanting India to break up. On the contrary, what I say comes from love and pride. It comes from not wanting people to be killed, raped, imprisoned or have their finger-nails pulled out in order to force them to say they are Indians. It comes from wanting to live in a society that is striving to be a just one. Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free.
Arundhati Roy
October 26 2010
25 October, 2010 — Exclusive CounterPunch Report
Editorial Note: Nancy Scheper-Hughes is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she directs the doctoral program in medicine and society. Since 1996, she has been involved in active field research on the global traffic in human organs, following the movement of bodies, body parts, transplant doctors, their patients, brokers, and kidney sellers, and the practices of organ and tissue harvesting in several countries – from Brazil, Argentina, and Cuba, to Moldova, Israel and Turkey, to India, South Africa, and the United States. She is a co-founder of Organs Watch, an independent, medical human rights, research and documentation center at UC Berkeley.
What follows is her detailed report on the tissue, skin, bone and organ harvesting conducted for many years at Israel’s L. Greenberg National Institute of Forensic Medicine, a.k.a. The Abu Kabir Institute, under the aegis of its former director and current chief pathologist, Dr. Yehuda Hiss. Long before Donald Boström leveled allegations of organ-harvesting from Palestinians in the Swedish tabloid, Aftonbladet, in August 2009, causing furious accusations of “blood libel,” Dr. Scheper-Hughes had already interviewed Dr. Hiss and had on tape the interview that forms part of her report here.
Bassist Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Eviction and Arrest
Mingus is interviewed on the street as he is being evicted from his New York loft and later is arrested when a hypdermic needle is discovered in his possessions.
Mingus Epitaph Orchestra
Charles Mingus Epitaph Orchestra promotional video featuring Wynton Marsalis, Günther Schuller, Lew Soloff, Randy Brecker, Don Butterfield (ca. 1990)
Charles Mingus Meditations On Integration
Live in Belgium 1964. Charles Mingus bass – Eric Dolphy bass clarinet, flute – Clifford Jordan sax tenor – Jaki Byard piano – Dannie Richmond drums
25 October, 2010 — CounterCurrents – TomDispatch.com
This country is being run for the benefit of alien life forms. They’ve invaded; they’ve infiltrated; they’ve conquered; and a lot of the most powerful people on Earth do their bidding, including five out of our nine Supreme Court justices earlier this year and a whole lot of senators and other elected officials all the time. The monsters they serve demand that we ravage the planet and impoverish most human beings so that they might thrive. They’re like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, like the Terminators, like the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, except that those were on the screen and these are in our actual world.
We call these monsters corporations, from the word corporate which means embodied. A corporation is a bunch of monetary interests bound together into a legal body that was once considered temporary and dependent on local licensing, but now may operate anywhere and everywhere on Earth, almost unchallenged, and live far longer than you.
26 October, 2010 — RT.com
The largest leak of secret U.S. military documents in history is stirring up a storm of reaction. There’s outrage in Baghdad, as Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki says it threatens the balance of power in the country. The Iraq war files, published by online Whistle-blower Wikileaks, detail fifteen thousand violent deaths over the past six years – previously unaccounted for. Chris Nineham from the “Stop the War Coalition” says the U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned the country into a ticking time bomb.
26 October, 2010 — Foreign Policy in Focus
What were NBC executives thinking? The unemployment rate remains near double digits, and many Americans have simply stopped looking for work. And what does the network premier this fall but a sitcom called Outsourced about an American manager sent to run a call center in India. The jokes revolve around funny names, unappetizing food, Sikh turbans, arranged marriages. “It’s hard to know what a normal smell is here and what isn’t,” says Todd Dempsy, the culturally insensitive manager played by Ben Rappaport, in last week’s “Touched by an Anglo” episode. And there’s indeed something fishy about a show that capitalizes on U.S. jobs going overseas during an economic downturn.
On the other hand, Outsourced introduces American viewers to bhangra music and lots of Indian faces. It makes fun of the inanities of American culture (bachelorette parties, pimping cars, fake vomit). The acting is pretty good, including the very funny Sacha Dhawan and Anisha Nagarajan. An inter-cultural romance beckons on the horizon. There’s even the occasionally pointed comment, such as the assistant manager Rajiv’s aside to his American boss that “this country is just a cash register to you.”
22 October, 2010 — MRZine
John Maynard Keynes, though bourgeois in his outlook, was a remarkably insightful economist, whose book Economic Consequences of the Peace was copiously quoted by Lenin at the Second Congress of the Communist International to argue that conditions had ripened for the world revolution. But even Keynes’ insights could not fully comprehend the paradox that is capitalism.
In a famous essay ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren‘, written in 1930, Keynes had argued: ‘Assuming no important wars and no important increase in population, the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years. This means that the economic problem is not, if we look into the future, the permanent problem of the human race‘ (emphasis in the original).
25 October, 2010 — RT.com
Two Israeli soldiers, convicted of using a Palestinian a child as a human shield, face a prison sentence of up to three years. It’s the first time there’s been a conviction since Tel Aviv re-inforced a ban on using civilians in combat against their will. RT’s Paula Slier met the boy whose life was in the firing line.
25 October, 2010 — ICH
Torture, Killing, Children Shot
How the US Tried to Keep it all Quiet
Reports by Emily Dugan, Nina Lakhani, David Randall, Victoria Richards and Rachel Shields
Today, seven and a half years on from the order to invade, the largest leak in history has shown, far more than has been hitherto known, just what was unleashed by that declaration of war. The Iraqi security services tortured hundreds, and the US military watched, noted and emailed, but rarely intervened. Continue
25 October, 2010
Wonderful song by Doc Jazz about the Freedom Flotilla. Please watch, then pass on to your own contacts. The song is clear and eloquent and should be seen around the world.
26 October, 2010 — The Only Democracy?
When the specifics of Israel’s siege of Gaza came to light, it appeared almost random in its insanity and cruelty. The famous example is the prohibiting of pasta while allowing rice, all the while claiming this was somehow ensuring Israel’s security. Well wonder no longer. Through the heroic efforts of Gisha, whose work we feature regularly here on The Only Democracy?, the actual policy has been released. It turns out there is a detailed series of charts and formulae that look like someone attempted to translate the lectures of Glenn Beck into public policy. In the driest of terms, it represents a calculus of human misery, equations of despair that add up to the starvation of Gazans and a protracted conflict.
Here is Gisha’s summary of the revealed policy, with my annotations.
“Policy of Deliberate Reduction”
The documents reveal that the state approved “a policy of deliberate reduction” for basic goods in the Gaza Strip (section h.4, page 5*). Thus, for example, Israel restricted the supply of fuel needed for the power plant, disrupting the supply of electricity and water. The state set a “lower warning line” (section g.2, page 5) to give advance warning of expected shortages in a particular item, but at the same time approved ignoring that warning, if the good in question was subject to a policy of “deliberate reduction“. Moreover, the state set an “upper red line” above which even basic humanitarian items could be blocked, even if they were in demand (section g.1, page 5). The state claimed in a cover letter to Gisha that in practice, it had not authorized reduction of “basic goods” below the “lower warning line”, but it did not define what these “basic goods” were (page 2).