End of War Coalition in Iraq October 11, 2007
Posted by محمد الحسن in Iraq, UK, USA, War.1 comment so far
The decision by the British regime to withdraw a number of its occupation troops from Iraq has drawn reactions from inside and outside the US. The American press in the past couple of days has repeatedly reviewed this issue and have reported the end of the war coalition in Iraq.
The Los Angeles Time wrote: the US should take lesson from the withdrawal of the British troops from Iraq and stop beating the drums of war through deceit on the pretext of creating stability because the members of the war coalition are leaving the bloody war zone of Iraq, The last of such coalition members was Britain the closest US ally which announced it would pull its troops out.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown last week announced that by the summer of 2008 half of the total number of British occupation forces will be withdrawn from Iraq. Therefore only 2500 British occupation forces will remain in Iraq, which compared to the 130,000 forces of the US occupiers is nothing.
One day before Brown’s decision the Czech Republic, which is also an accomplice to the American-occupation of Iraq, said it would pull its 100 forces out of Iraq. With such a decision the Czech Republic also joined ranks of countries withdrawing their occupation forces from Iraq.
Italy, Spain, Ukraine, Japan, the Netherlands and Norway were among countries whose occupation contingents have been withdrawn from Iraq. As this trend continues the efforts by the US regime to justify the occupation of Iraq will receive a serious blow. Of course, from the very beginning of the Iraq war there was no real coalition and the US regime had the biggest share in terms of the number of occupation forces and military equipment in Iraq.
The number of soldiers dispatched by some of the so-called war coalition members was less than 50 and they never participated in any military operation. US President George W. Bush in a bid to deflect public pressures has said that by the summer of 2008 he will bring 100,000 of his occupation troops out of Iraq. But still it is not certain whether Bush will keep his promise.
IRIB
Former Malaysian PM: History should remember Blair and Bush as children killers and lying war criminals October 11, 2007
Posted by محمد الحسن in Malaysia, UK, USA.Tags: Atrocities, Criminals, Terrorism
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Malaysian ex-premier Mahathir Mohamad has said history should remember Blair and Bush as children killers and lying war criminals. In a keynote speech at the ‘Expose War Crimes: Criminalize War Exhibition’ Mahathir Mohamad said war has in fact ‘legitimized terror’ orchestrated by powerful states against the weak.
He added what former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush have done in Afghanistan and Iraq is much worse than the atrocities of Saddam.
The former Malaysian prime minister also suggested that a permanent tribunal be set up for criminalizing war in order to hear charges levelled at warmongers, leaders and the governments of aggressor nations.
He said: “History should remember Blair and Bush as the killers of children or as the lying prime minister and president,” adding that terrorism stems from the actions of powerful countries that kill innocent civilians, which is much worse than the crimes of terrorists.
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Turkey Authorizes Troops to Enter Iraq October 11, 2007
Posted by محمد الحسن in Iraq, Turkey, War.add a comment
Turkey took a step toward a military operation in Iraq on Tuesday, as its top political and military leaders issued a statement authorizing troops to cross the Iraq border to eliminate separatist Kurdish rebel camps in the northern region.
Turkey moved toward military action in the face of strong opposition by the United States, which is anxious to maintain peace in the region, one of the rare areas of stability in conflict-torn Iraq. But more than two dozen Turkish soldiers have been killed in recent days, and the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan seemed far more determined than before to act decisively.
A government official without authorization to speak publicly on the issue who asked not to be identified by name, said preparations were under way to seek parliamentary approval for a cross-border military operation, a request that would be the first formal step toward an offensive.
The Associated Press reported that the request would be submitted to Parliament as early as Wednesday.
Government offices and institutions have been ordered “to take all economic and political measures, including cross-border operations when necessary, in order to end the existence of the terror organization in a neighboring country,” said the statement, which was released by Mr. Erdogan’s office, after he met with political and military leaders in Ankara.
A Turkish military offensive into northern Iraq, while unlikely, would have far-reaching consequences for the United States. Turkey is a NATO member and has the region’s most powerful army. Turkey’s support of the United States in the Iraq war is crucial. The United States’ Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey supplies the military in central Iraq.
Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman, said the United States had encouraged Turkish officials to work together with the Iraqi government.
“In our view, it is not going to lead to a long-term, durable solution to have significant incursions from Turkey into Iraq,” he said at a news briefing in Washington.
But Iraq’s government has little authority in the region, which is controlled exclusively by Kurds, and an accord reached by Iraq’s interior minister and senior Turkish officials last month did not include permission for military operations, a formulation that frustrated Turkey.
Relations between the United States and Turkey are delicate on another front. A bill on the Armenian genocide — the killing of more than a million Armenians by Turkey at the end of World War I — is due before the House Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday. Turks have been working to prevent its consideration, with Mr. Erdogan making phone calls Tuesday, according to a Turkish member of Parliament in Washington to work against the bill.
Its passage “would be insulting to Turkey,” said Egeman Bagis, the Parliament member. “It would mean losing Turkey’s support in the region.”
He did not say precisely what that might mean. Turkey ended military cooperation with France last year after France voted to make denial of the Armenian genocide a crime.
“It could make it very difficult for Turkey to continue supporting” the United States in Iraq, Mr. Bagis said.
Turkey’s foreign minister, Ali Babacan, made a similar appeal to Israeli authorities on a visit over the weekend, asking them to press Congress to drop the matter. Turkey has close relations with Israel, and Turkish officials have bristled at a recent statement by the Anti-Defamation League declaring that the killing of Armenians was “tantamount to genocide.”
Some analysts said that given the complex relationships among Turkey, Iraq and the United States, Turkey would continue to consider military action a last resort.
Edip Baser, a retired general who was special coordinator in a United States-Turkey effort against the Kurdish Workers’ Party in 2006, said it was likely that political and military leaders would wait for the appropriate time to act.
The government official who asked not to be identified by name said: “Our government will soon start technical consultation with the military to see what they need in order to end this violence that make our hearts bleed. First, there needs to be necessary preparations and assessments. We can say that they have already started.” Senior cabinet members, state officials and high-ranking military officials met Tuesday after President Abdullah Gul, Mr. Erdogan and Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, the leader of the Turkish Army, vowed to strengthen efforts against the Kurdish Workers’ Party, the Kurdish rebel group.
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Musharraf ‘wins’ Pakistan vote October 7, 2007
Posted by محمد الحسن in Pakistan.Tags: Busharraf
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Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, has been re-elected by legislators, officials said, although doubts remain over whether the supreme court will let him claim victory.
Politicians voted on Saturday, but a winner will not be declared until Musharraf’s eligibility for the poll has been approved by the court, which meets on October 17.
Following the vote in a televised address, Musharraf called on opposition parties to accept the outcome and urged them not to destabilise the state by holding strikes or protests.
“I appeal to the people for a conciliatory approach, let sanity prevail,” he said.
But he refused to say what he would do if the supreme court overturns the result, adding: “Let them come to their decision, then we will decide.”
In the two houses of parliament, Musharraf won 252 of 257 votes, and also won the most votes in three of four provincial assemblies, officials said.
About 30 per cent of national assembly opposition politicians resigned before the vote and Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party abstained.
A rival, Wajihdduin Ahmad, a former judge who refused to swear allegiance to Musharraf after the coup that brought him to power in 1999, got two votes. Three votes were rejected.
Ahmad told Al Jazeera that there was a good chance the supreme court would not endorse Musharraf’s victory.
“We have a very strong case,” he said.
Musharraf’s total electoral college vote, including the provincial assemblies, was 384 ballots out of 702, government officials said
Musharraf has been in conflict with the supreme court since he attempted to sack Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the chief justice.
However, Ayaz Amir, a Pakistani political columnist, told Al Jazeera that Pakistanis were very cynical about the validity of the poll.
“People are taking this election with a large bucketful of salt, ” he said.
Lawyers protests
Earlier, anti-government protests, led by lawyers, who have spearheaded a campaign against Musharraf in recent months, took place in Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar and Quetta.
Police fired tear gas to disperse lawyers pelting rocks at the North West Frontier Province assembly, and the lawyers also threw a burning effigy of the president on top of an armoured police vehicle.
Before election officials announced the result, Wajiha Mehdi, a lawyer and associate of Chaudhry, told Al Jazeera she believed that any win for Musharraf would be unconstitutional.
“The people of Pakistan are now going to speak. They have had enough.”
However, Amir said it was unlikely that the supreme court would overturn Musharraf’s victory.
Political wrangling
If his re-election is confirmed, the president has promised to leave his position as head of the army by November 15 and be sworn in as a civilian leader.
Opposition parties have vowed to stage protests over Musharraf’s decision not to step down from his army post ahead of the election.
But Musharraf had averted a walk-out by Bhutto’s PPP by granting her amnesty from corruption charges, paving the way for a power-sharing deal between the two politicians.
Bhutto, whose party is the country’s largest, had earlier threatened to further undermine Musharraf’s widely anticipated victory by pulling her MPs from parliament, after other opposition parties also resigned.
The amnesty clears the way for her planned homecoming on October 18 in the run-up to parliamentary elections due by early 2008.
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3 More US Occupation Forces Killed in Iraq October 7, 2007
Posted by محمد الحسن in Iraq, Resistance, USA.add a comment
The US military command in Iraq said in a statement: a roadside bomb south east of Baghdad on Saturday killed two US occupation forces and injured another two. The statement, however, did not mention the bomb blast near a US armored car in Salaheddin Province that killed another US soldier and injured another 3.
If US state department is to be believed since Iraq occupation in March 2003 by US forces 3812 occupation forces have been killed.
Individual news sources say this number to be over 13000.
IRIB
Bush admin planning ’surgical’ strikes in Iran October 2, 2007
Posted by محمد الحسن in Iran, USA, War.3 comments
Australia, Britain and Israel have “expressed interest” in a US campaign to launch “surgical” bombing raids on Iran targeting the Revolutionary Guard facilities, one of the US’s leading investigative reporters, Seymour Hersh, reports.
In a lengthy article in the latest issue of The New Yorker, Hersh details how the US is making plans for a strike on Iran, beefing up intelligence resources within the CIA and shifting its rhetorical campaign in a bid to win support from the American people should the strikes proceed.
Hersh says the Administration has stopped trying to justify the campaign on the basis of curtailing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, to redefining the war in Iraq as a strategic battle.
This is because there is a consensus within the intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb, Hersh said in an interview on CNN on Sunday.
Hersh pointed to a speech US President George Bush made in August to the American legion in which he said: “The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian supplied munitions have increased … the Iranian regime must halt these actions and, until it does, I will take actions necessary to protect our troops.”
He ended: “I have authorised our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”
Since then Mr Bush has made a number of other comments that suggest the Administration might still be hopeful of a diplomatic solution and, in recent weeks, has prevailed upon France to assist in dealing with Tehran.
A Pentagon spokesman in response to Hersh’s inquiries said: “The President has made it clear that the US Government remains committed to a diplomatic solution with respect to Iran.”
The White House declined to comment, and Hersh says he was warned during his research that the President had yet to issue an execute order on the plans, and that such an order may never be issued.
But Hersh’s article detailed conversations with numerous sources in the Department of Defence, the CIA and former Administration officials who have heard talk of the strike plans.
Hersh said the bombing plan has had its most positive reception from Britain’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.
While Hersh did not mention Australia in the article, he told CNN that there had been “expressions of interest” from Australia and Israel for the strike plan.
“There’s been expressions of interest from Australia, other countries,” he said.
“The Israelis, of course, have gone bananas. They’re very upset about the idea of not going. If you’re going into Iran, the Israeli position is very firm. They want us to go. And they want us to hit hard. As an Israeli told me, if you run into a lion, you either shoot it or ignore it. You don’t pluck out its eyebrows.”
Australia’s Minister for Defence, Brendan Nelson, was in the US a month ago for briefings with defence officials and a meeting with Defence Secretary Robert Gates.
He told reporters at the time that he had discussed Iran, but declined to elaborate.
Hersh said the revised bombing plan with its tightened focus on “counter-terrorism” was gathering support among the generals and admirals in the Pentagon, who had been apprehensive about the earlier broader bombing plan.
“The strategy calls for the use of sea-launched cruise missiles and more precisely targeted ground attacks and bombing strikes, including plans to destroy the most important Revolutionary Guard training camps, supply depots and command-and-control facilities,” Hersh wrote.
He said there were also plans to hit Iran’s anti-aircraft surface-to-air missile sites.
He said a Pentagon consultant on “counter-terrorism” had told him that if the bombing campaign took place, it would be accompanied by a series of what he called “short sharp incursions” by American Special Forces into suspected Iranian training sites.
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Barak: profile of a brutal child-killer October 1, 2007
Posted by محمد الحسن in Israel, Palestine.Tags: Criminals, Terrorism, Zionism
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Ehud Barak, the certified Zionist war criminal, is threatening to turn Gaza Strip into a full-fledged concentration camp.
Last week, the Israeli war minister who is believed to be responsible for the murder of hundreds of Palestinian children during the first few months of the Aqsa Intifada in 2000 and 2001, disclosed a new policy toward the Gaza Strip resembling very much the manner in which the Nazi authorities treated Jews in the course of World War II.
Barak said he would make sure that very little food and medicine will be allowed to reach Gaza. He also said that Israel would cut off electricity supplies to the hermetically blockaded costal enclave which already looks very much like a concentration camp.
For those who don’t know, Barak has a long history of criminality and murderousness toward the Palestinians. In 1998, when he wanted to impress the Israeli public to elect him as Prime Minister, he had to remind them of the most graphic details of one of his murderous missions in Beirut.
The ghoulish tactic worked, and the Israeli Jewish public gave him a certificate of good conduct.
Now Barak is planning to become Prime Minister once again, and his way to expedite and accelerate his plans in this regard is by murdering Palestinian children nearly on a daily basis.
On Thursday, 20 September, the Israeli occupation army murdered three additional Palestinian minors in the Gaza Strip. One of the boys was crushed to death by an American-supplied bulldozer. Graphic pictures of the badly-mutilated boy were shown all over the world, while Israeli boys and girls on talkback forums were busy congratulating themselves “on teaching Palestinians a lesson.!”
More than 20 Palestinian civilians, including 9 children have been murdered by the Israeli occupation army so far this month.
The Israeli army acknowledges rather reluctantly that civilians are killed when tanks fire their heavy artillery shells onto crowded Palestinian neighborhoods.
And every time Palestinian civilians are murdered, which happens routinely, the Israeli government says “sorry,” claiming that the victims are not targeted deliberately and the victims are merely “collateral damage.”
Well, one doesn’t have to be a great military expert to understand that when tanks fire their heavy shells onto crowded civilian neighborhoods, children and civilians will be killed and maimed.
In the final analysis, killing knowingly is killing deliberately, and when the killing happens on a daily basis and the number of civilian victims is in the hundreds or thousands, intent becomes irrelevant.
It is widely understood that one of the main reasons for the persistent and unmitigated pornographic killings of helpless and unprotected Palestinians is the disgraceful silence of the international community, especially the United States , toward Israeli criminality.
This is not a new behavior. The US always looked the other way whenever Israel indulged in murdering civilians, even when there is no question as to the deliberate targeting of civilians, as was the case during Israel’s genocidal campaign against Lebanon in 2006, as testified by Human Rights Watch and other human rights organizations.
Of course, a country that killed or caused the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians under the false rubric of ridding Iraq of its non-existent weapons of mass destruction can’t be expected to behave morally.
After all, the last thing racist and Godless Ashkenazi Jews who hold the Bush administration by the throat, is matters of justice and morality.
But the world is not only America and Israel . There are millions of other peoples around the world who don’t accept America’s Nazi-like approach toward international politics, which is based on unilateralism, hegemony and coercion.
Today, the creeping Jewish genocide in Palestine takes many forms. These include starving millions of innocent Palestinians, barring Palestinians from accessing food and work, mainly by transforming their population centers into detention camps and constantly killing Palestinians, including children.
True, the scope of the daily killings has not reached the Auschwitz levels. But the fact that it hasn’t is not attributed to Zionist morality or magnanimity but rather to concerns about possible reactions by the international public opinions.
This means that Israel, a country that has much in common with Nazi Germany, wouldn’t hesitate to adopt a more daring approach toward the Palestinians if the world’s callous indifference toward the Palestinian plight continued.
In short, the world has to make its stand clear. Is it willing to allow Israel to commit a holocaust by killing and/or causing the death of tens of thousands of Palestinians?
Does the world believe that a holocaust against the Palestinians will be kosher just because Jews, not Germans, happen to be the perpetrators?
In the early 1940s, the world, or much of it, stood silent as the Gestapo, SS and the Wehrmacht were exterminating innocent people, Jews and non-Jews in order to fulfil the nefarious concept of “the Master race.”
Now, the world is passively watching Israel’s creeping genocide against the Palestinians, all in the name of Jewish nationalism and “the chosen people.”
Has humanity reverted to the age of cannibalism?
Khalid Amayreh
Palestine-Info
Iran Labels US Forces as Terrorist October 1, 2007
Posted by محمد الحسن in Iran, Terrorism, USA.add a comment
Iran on Sunday dismissed a recent approval by the US House of Representatives to blacklist the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist group, and said that the word terrorist is a proper title for the military and security forces of the United States.
“The word terrorist suits the military and security forces of the US,” Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Seyed Mohammad Ali Hosseini said during his weekly press conference here today.
He further expressed surprise at the blatant disrespect for the international rules and norms, saying, “Placing the armed forces of the UN member states on the list of terrorist groups is unprecedented.”
Asked about his country’s nuclear case, the spokesman said that Tehran would continue its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to defuse a row over its nuclear program, adding that some Western states are trying to disrupt the process.
“The process that certain radical countries have followed so far is to disrupt the positive climate that has been put in place through the cooperation of the Islamic Republic of Iran with the agency,” he said.
Hosseini added that despite their intense efforts to disrupt Tehran’s cooperation with the IAEA, the said states “have failed in the latest meeting of the 5+1 Group”.
He said that due to the strong support shown by some of the 5+1 member states for Iran-IAEA cooperation, the extremist states were eventually forced in the meeting to respect the views of other countries which were more realistic, “and therefore they have been forced to be patient.”
Hosseini further called on those 5+1 member states which backed Iran-IAEA cooperation in the last meeting to continue with their support and to advise others to follow them.
Also in response to questions about Iran’s possible reaction to a third set of sanctions by the UN Security Council, he said, “To avoid possible sanctions, we are going to continue working with the agency and our diplomatic efforts will continue unabated,” adding that the next round of talks to discuss the remaining questions about Iran’s P1 and P2 centrifuges will be held in early October.”
Meantime, the spokesman stressed that Iran’s nuclear case should go through its normal course at the IAEA.
Asked about Iran’s reaction to possible military threats or invasions, he said that his country has all the necessary means and the required preventative power to defend itself, but meantime, assured that Iran poses no threat to any other country.
Fars News
Iranian MPs Designate US Army, CIA “Terrorist Outfits” October 1, 2007
Posted by محمد الحسن in CIA, Iran, Terrorism, USA.add a comment
Iranian lawmakers on Saturday in a statement designated the US army and CIA as terrorist outfits in view of the dirty record of state terrorism of Washington including the criminal bombardment of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic weapons in 1945 when the Second World War was almost over. The statement said the CIA has been involved in establishment of terror networks and training of terrorists worldwide.
It added the criminal record of the CIA and the US Army includes: “the dropping of atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the genocide in Vietnam, the use of depleted uranium bombs in the Balkans and the occupied countries of Iraq and Afghanistan, and support for the illegal Zionist entity’s massacres of the Palestinian and Lebanese people.”
The MPs further noted that the CIA and the US army had actively helped Saddam and the MKO terrorist outfit during the 8-year war imposed on Iran in the 1980s.
The statement added that in addition to the creation of al-Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban, the CIA is involved in running secret prisons in Europe and meting out subhuman treatment to prisoners in the notorious Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons.
IRIB
Neocons seek to justify action against Teheran October 1, 2007
Posted by محمد الحسن in Iran, Neocons, USA.add a comment
Members of the US secretariat in the United Nations were asked earlier this month to begin “searching for things that Iran has done wrong”, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.
Some US diplomats believe the exercise — reminiscent of attempts by vice-president Dick Cheney and the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld to build the case against Saddam Hussein before the Iraq war — will boost calls for military action by neo-conservatives inside and outside the administration.
One diplomat revealed the plans for an Iran dossier to Steven Clemons, a fellow with the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, who has previously revealed attempts by Mr Cheney’s allies to pressurise President George W Bush into war.
He said: “There are people more beholden to the Cheney side who have people searching for things that Iran has done wrong — making the case. They’ve been given instructions to build a dossier. They’ve been scouring around for stuff over the last couple of weeks.” He recently exposed how a member of Mr Cheney’s office used private meetings with neo-conservatives at the American Enterprise think- tank to reveal the vice-president’s frustration that Mr Bush had authorised a diplomatic strategy against Iran by his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.
Last week, Newsweek magazine went further, claiming that David Wurmser, until last month Mr Cheney’s Middle East adviser, had told fellow neo-conservatives that Mr Cheney had considered asking Israel to launch limited missile strikes against the Iranian nuclear site at Natanz. The intention, it was said, would be to provoke a reaction from Teheran that would help justify wider US air strikes.
Mr Wurmser, an analyst in the Pentagon unit that tried to link Saddam Hussein to the September 11 attacks, denied the claims, saying, “That conspiracy is unrecognisable to anything I have ever seen or heard or done.” But he refused to discuss Mr Cheney’s views.
Opponents of military action were further alarmed last week when it emerged that Norman Podhoretz, one of the godfathers of neo-conservatism, used a 45-minute meeting with Mr Bush at the White House to lobby for the bombing of Iran’s nuclear plants.
Mr Podhoretz disclosed that, when he said Mr Bush was just “giving futility its chance” by pursuing diplomacy, the president and his former aide Karl Rove had burst out laughing. “It struck me,” Mr Podhoretz added, “that if they really believed that there was a chance for these negotiations and sanctions to work, they would not have laughed. They would have got their backs up and said, ‘No, no, it’s not futile, there’s a very good chance’.” He said he believed “Bush is going to hit” Iran before his presidency ends.
Mr Podhoretz is highly influential. His son-in-law is Elliott Abrams, Mr Bush’s deputy national security adviser, who is regarded by US officials as a key advocate of bombing Iran. He was found guilty of withholding evidence from Congress over the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.
Concern is also growing in the CIA and the Pentagon that the White House exaggerated intelligence used to justify an Israeli air raid on a suspected nuclear facility in Syria earlier this month, which some neo-conservatives hope is a precursor to war with Iran.
Bruce Reidel, a former CIA Middle East desk officer, said the neo-conservatives realised their influence would wane rapidly when Mr Bush left office in just over 15 months. “Whatever crazy idea they have to try to transform the Middle East, they have to push now. The real hardline neo-conservatives are getting desperate that the door of history is about to close on them with an epitaph of total failure.”
Telegraph
